Lots of Christians hate and have hated Jews for millennia now. Lots of Jews look down on gentiles; Judaism has never had a warm spot for Christianity. Lots of white people did and do think blacks are inferior. A good number of black people have never had much love or respect for white people. Lots of people fear Muslims for no good reason and a lot of Muslims have given a good number of Jews and Christians something to fear. Indians hate Pakistanis and Pakistanis hate Indians, yet half of them are probably related at some point.
Prejudice, racism, ethnic rivalry, religious hatred . . . It’s part of who we are as humans. It seems naive to think it would not be sprinkled (maybe more than sprinkled) throughout the history of our thinking and doing. Acknowledge it, accept it, teach your children how how to overcome it, how to empathize and minimize the impulse, move on.
21
Perhaps the takeaway from this is that philosophers are as wrong and irrelevant as the self righteous, sexist, racist and prejudiced religious leaders that many of us have known
7
Identity philosophy?
8
In one of his greatest essays, Kant declares the motto of The Enlightenment sapere aude or "dare to know." Maybe our age's motto should be "Stoop to censor."
17
Being anti- Judaism, or not at least not appreciating a religion that considers a local, ethnic deity to be the creator of the universe, and a tiny minority of humanity to be chosen people, is not being anti-Semitic.
11
Philosophy is religion by another name. It is snake oil poured on top of baseless opinions.
6
Thank you for your article. And yes they should mention those harmful prejudices.
But I am more worried about supposed liberal free-thinking media like NYTimes, that more and more frequently publish antisemitic pieces compared to before. Alas, as predicted, the NYTimes and the American Left is going the way of the new European left. How sad, and concerning for us American jews.
But of course this is part of the larger problem in today's world, which embraces evils such as sexism, hate, violence, closed-thinking and oppression, censorship, all under the banner of so-called religious freedom and political correctness.
12
This article makes no mention of Martin Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies," a virulent anti semitic screed if ever there was one. Lutherans have been making excuses for this book and trying to wiggle out from under it for centuries, concentrating instead on Luther's reforms and opposition to Catholic doctrine. But it's out there and it won't go away. The Nazis were very big fans of Martin Luther.
15
But Wittgenstein was Jewish. So how can you say he promulgated anti-Semitic views?
6
One should read "Constantine's Sword" to discover how anti-Semitism infected the gamut of Christian-European thought and politics to the point of pathological, clinical obsession.
9
The only philosopher that matters anyway is Spinoza, and he was a Jew
6
How about confronting the ethnic/racial superiority inherent in Judaism? A central tenet is that the Jews are God's chosen people. Millions of Jews hear about it every week in synagogues around the world.
How about the anti-gentile content of the Talmud?
13
Western philosophy is but one manifestation of the anti-Semitism (or, before that, anti-Judaism of early Christianity, or, before that, anti-pharisee Judaism of the Christian sect of Jews). The very essence of Christianity since late in the first century has been to bury its origin as a Jewish sect and reinvent itself as a wholly separate religion -- something that the Jew Jesus and his almost entirely Jewish band of disciples would be shocked to see. But we are not shocked, because what the author describes is but one facet of a European culture, whose immutable nature was forged on the anvil of a Christian identity built on opposition to Judaism.
10
So now "an attempt to diminish the influence of Judaism or the Jewish people on European history" is anti-semitism? and what evidence is offered for this claim? That Hume "made no effort to trace a linear development of man from the ancient Jews to the modern world". I suppose he also made no effort to trace the influence of Homo Sapiens on the history of Europe. Or the influence of the Mongols and Persians? Is all history of Europe begins with the Jews? I, as a Jew, am shocked and offended by attitude.
18
Sayre's law
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
The study of philosophy is irrelevant.
4
There are times when talk of identity and prejudice illuminates something, and times when it obscures, and I think that this is an instance of obscuring.
German enlightenment thinkers like Kant actually engaged deeply with Judaic traditions, but this op-ed ignores this theme in favor of a cheap shot.
German thinkers (Lessing, Kant, etc.) were obsessed with rationalizing the Bible. The Jews - and not the actual Jews in German neighborhoods but the Judaic tradition in thinking - was a thorn in the side of German rationalists. To put it crudely, the German thinkers loved the beauty of ancient Greek reason and enlightenment, and could not fathom how an obscure people like the Jews, and an obscure Jew like Jesus, came to dominate over the grand culture of ancient Hellenism. The Jews did not fit in Kant's (and other's) narrative of cultural progress. There was particular annoyance with Judaic ways of knowing, like by revelation, or by scriptural interpretation, that no doubt seemed frustratingly imprecise to the Germans.
This whole grand tension between Greek reason and Judaic revelation seems to be subsumed in this op-ed beneath a superficial "better question" about whether we need to talk about Kant's anti-semitism in a philosophy class. I'm not appalled by the identity politics of this piece but just bored.
20
If Prof. Shrage is going to call Hume a racist, can't she at least quote something from him directly that supports that? Is the evidence mainly that Hume *omitted* to draw certain connections that she or Popkin thinks he ought to have drawn?
Likewise, if Prof. Shrage wants to tell us that Kant thought Jews were inferior to Christians, can't she find something in his own writings that supports this?
What would Prof. Shrage think if one of her students submitted a paper on one of these philosophers that made little direct reference to their works but relied mainly on secondary sources?
12
Soon Steve Brannon , Steve King and Trump will be listed as great thinkers and philosophers and their twitter accounts will be in the library of Congress as great works of philosophy .
So disappointing to read such junk in the name of philosophy by opportunists of their time whose minds were infested with bigotry , racism judging humans by their color , cast and creed .
Majority of the readers will no doubt have never read these authors but will take away out of context half truths from this junk and comments against Jewish faith adding further insult to injury !
Have we not witnessed enough hatred recently in the era of creeping white nationalism in Europe ,USA , Australia & Canada ?
When are human beings going to propagate humanism and peace ?
3
The answer to the question is, as we lawyers like to say, it depends. If you teach something by these guys that's more or less about whether particular statements make sense, it might be irrelevant to tackle the groups they prejudged. If you're talking about how their views of different groups affected or skewed their world views, it seems like the fact they applied shadowy versions of "history" mixed with religion to their analyses of how different civilizations operated could be quite relevant. After reading the piece, I read (by quirk of Google), Voltaire's
"definition" of Adam in his "dictionary" of philosophy. It's, to me, worse than the author depicts. Basically, Voltaire says, how dare an isolated little country like Judea, that lacked a library like Alexandria's (maybe they were using their resources to avoid the constant invasions), think they were at the center of mankind's origins? And yet, he seems to accept their religious mythology to say, well, you're not descended from the same people as anyone else, therefore you're losers. That's some logic. Is all his so-called logic like that? Maybe the problem isn't so much that he's an anti-semite as a self-important pseudophilosopher.
Antisemitism is, like most philosophies, a political doctrine. As we're seeing these days, autocracies, including organized religions, love to use people who don't buy into the groupthink as the enemy of the people. We have our groupthink but it's not yours.
2
"Philosophy’s Anti-Semitism"
While reading this article, I was surprised at how many parts of it dealt with religion.
Given that religion is most commonly associated with unproven myths and superiority complexes of "mine is the only true one", I wonder whether we are really talking about philosophy or rather with religious induced persecution of those who do not believe the same myths as the majority.
A good question I heard, for the first time, the other day dealt with the crucifixion: Why is it that the Romans, who were completely in charge and drove the whole thing, were assigned almost no blame in the crucifixion, leaving the Jews as the only party to be blamed throughout history.
If you are programmed to believe the worst about Jews, you will find arguments to disqualify them and paint them as subhuman.
You can call that philosophy if you wish.
3
You have to understand the impurity of history. We theorize about "violence," for example. But the word is in our heads because Caesar conquered Gaul. And there is no alternative language out there that is not rooted in historical violence. Wilson was a racist who purged blacks from U.S. government jobs. Wilsonian internationalism, however, the self-determination of nations, free trade, pluralism--that stuff needs to be taught. And I'm not sure that Wilson's personal racism was "intrinsic" to understanding Wilsonian internationalism's significance. Kant's Perpetual Peace, along the same lines: Whatever his personal views, was also a strong formulation that needs to be taught. By contrast I'm not sure you can teach Nazism without the racism and anti-semitism. It affected not just what they chose to do, but how to go about doing it: wasting bullets and resources annihilating holocaust victims while the Russian armies were not far off. So you can't understand Nazism without the anti-semitism. But you can understand liberal internationalism without Wilson's racism or Kant's anti-semitism. They didn't bake those views into their theories.
6
‘When the anti-Semitic views of great thinkers such as Kant, Voltaire or Hume (or Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, for that matter) are exposed’
Calling racists and narrow minded people like the one you quote here as philosophers and great thinkers is insult to the real philosophers like Socrates , Aristotle , Ghazali, Ibne - Khaldoon .
Any one who believes and promotes human inequality based on tribalism , race , color and creed and allocating intelligence based on geographical origin as described by these so called philosophers ,cannot be called a thinker . These were perverts of their era .
Real philosophers do not go to schools of philosophy and learn it from professors !
Alexander would have been a great philosopher as his teacher was Aristotle.
A great number of Noble prize winners after 1945 were German Jews who left Nazi Germany and contributed to the advancement of knowledge in every field of science in Europe,USA and Russia .
And who was Christ ? A poor Jew who was crucified for his teachings and philosophy . What is Christianity ? A theology concocted by a Roman Emperor after almost 200 years of death of Christ and not what Christ had preached .
Truth hurts. To paint European Christians as a superior genes over Jewish faith is abomination of philosophy !
2
Perhaps philosophers should study Judaism before trying to figure out what Voltaire, Hume, Kant were so anti.
5
Why pick on Kant, Voltaire and Hume?
Rank anti-Semitism is ubiquitous on the internet,
Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543) is still well worth reading, but it runs 65,000 words, so for people who are busy with other things today but still want to get a good idea of the depths to which Jew hatred can drive a man, here are a few choice morsels of the thoughts of the founder of the Protestant reformation on this subject.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-quot-the-jews-and-their-lies-quot
8
"There are philosophers who contend that such projects inappropriately politicize our truth-seeking endeavors, but, as some philosophers of science have shown, objective truth involves the convergence of multiple observations and perspectives"
Neo liberalism and multi culturalism was bound to spread it's stifling web into the art of philosophy.
These great thinkers should be read for their brilliant speculations about the nature of life - Such value lies in their brilliant imaginings and questions. -AND maybe some trifle of clarity.
Like with most contemporary philosophers a minority were rabid jew haters like Heidegger - The majority were just struggling with objective truths from their time and place -AND anyone worthy of their wisdom knows that already (it's not exactly brain science)
The art essence of Philosophy like great literature stands outside of culture.
A new sociology and history book arrives by the minute!
Shakespeare and Kant are rarer than a European non anti-semite.
For which we can thank western religion!
Anti-Semitism may have been the explanation why Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), one of the greatest German poets, is remembered unfavorably by many Jews for his conversion to Christianity. There were a few options for those who – like Heine – struggled with their Jewish heritage and identity, to assimilate themselves: education, socialism and conversion to Catholicism.
Apparently Heine suffered throughout his formative years. He decided to separate himself from the Jewish community and adopt the German culture and make gentile friends. It was a terrible experience, because he found himself hated both by Jews and Christians.
Sadly, Jewish academics in the West still face social biases and discrimination. The Harvard philosopher William Hocking is said to have claimed that “the Jewish mind could not properly interpret and teach the philosophy and history of Western Christian civilization.” What a load of nonsense.
6
Do we really need to micro-analyze all aspects of historical thinking, or do we need to establish (maybe... re-establish, given the current demolition of our humanities based education) a solid branch of ethics and sociology into our core, educational curriculum?
I think that there needs to be a certain amount of economy within each discipline, in order to properly teach. Students with a solid dialogue and engagement in social values have the ability to discern and discard much of the prejudices of past centuries and cultures.
37
Hume's convenient blind spot vis a vis Jews provides unwitting confirmation of his own conclusion that reason and logic, however persuasive, rarely prevail against entrenched feelings born of self interest.
45
The article writer seems to think that when we teach philosophical writers, it is to glorify the writers and their culture, not because some of their thinking is considered valuable. Obviously they don't teach nonsense like "Adamites" any more. So what's wrong with philosophy departments continuing to do what they're doing now?
It's not just the history of philosophy that has dark corners. Carolus Linnaeus divided humanity into 4 races, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Yet we still use his nomenclature when classifying species.
And, by the way, in a long article about excluding Jews from philosophy, why does she never mention Baruch Spinoza?
61
Thank you Professor Shrage. You point out something pointed out by others in the field -- I am thinking of the fascinating book on the history of ideas by UChicago Prof David Nirenberg, "Anti-Judaism" which traces, among others, Christian anti-semitic views through the work of the philosophers you mention. Of course, studying them side by side would help to enlighten ourselves and enliven the discussion.
For Jews, though, this is phenomenon is a matter of life and death. One just needs to google "anti-semitism" to find people wondering and quetioning why anti-semitism appears to persist, even in the face of massive genocide of millions during the Shoah. IMHO it persists because of the legacy of western philosophy which sees Judaism as retrogressive, wrong, and even evil, compared to "progressive" Christianity and all its philosophical derivatives. For example, our leftist anti-semitic friends in England might start to question where their double-standard thought against Jews and Judaism comes from, even when they insist it is anti-Zionist only.
26
One thing I don't quite understand about this article is the complete lack of countervailing evidence or thought (another comment by Jon J below touches on this a bit as well) that would go against the narrative of anti-semitism being widespread throughout European philosophy. Let me give just two examples:
1) Baruch Spinoza - Arguably one of the greatest philosophers of all time (and a personal favorite), who just so happens to also be one of the architects of Enlightenment philosophy and rationalism. I learned about him a long time ago during the undergrad years majoring in philosophy, and his importance as a thinker is unquestioned in philosophical circles. He was Jewish
2) Friedrich Nietzsche - Another extremely influential philosopher of the Western tradition. Also happened to despise anti-semitism (although confusion abounds because his sister was a proponent of this sort of bigotry, and also reworked some of his unpublished work to fit her twisted worldview of German supremacy)
I happen to believe that philosophers like Kant or Hume need to have their more sordid or prejudiced views out there in the open so we can understand all aspects of these human beings, and where they may have gone astray. But I also don't really get overly simplistic narratives of "Western philosophy" that would treat the entire discipline as one thing, when examples of the polar opposite abound, especially among the pantheon of greats in the tradition.
55
@Pete When discussing Spinoza's Jewishness, it is important to be aware of his excommunication from Amsterdam's Portuguese Sephardic community in 1656, when he was 23. Although the writ of herem (the ban) does not specify the reasons for his excommunication, it's likely that it was for espousing the rationalistic tenets that appear in his mature thought. https://www.neh.gov/article/why-spinoza-was-excommunicated
9
I agree with those who suggest that philosophers like Hume and Kant have crucial contributions to make to Western philosophy and ideology. The question is contextualization. Kant's Perpetual Peace provided the intellectual rationale for a universal history that justified the taking of Indigenous lands. Herder, who is often mentioned only as a justification for ethnonationalist excess and is remembered mainly in intro Political Theory courses in Canada at least in Kant's negative book review of his history, needs to also be remembered for his forthright support for the right of Indigenous peoples to resist invasion. I think similar contextualization of their false assertions regarding Jews and their philosophical orientations would be in order.
15
There is no thought that is not a product of its cultural context, and no culture, including our own, that is not awash in prejudice and barbarism. I applaud the expansion of the philosophical "canon," but if we do it to reassure ourselves of our freedom from primitive illusions, we have learned nothing. Philosophy is concerned with the possibility of truths at the most universal and foundational level. The brilliance of Hume or Kant is in their attempts at universality; If their prejudices (or those of Asian or African thinkers) can be shown to limit these attempts in specific ways, then those prejudices are philosophically important. But if we're only out to multiply perspectives instead of uniting them, then we aren't practicing philosophy, but a kind of self-serving refusal of philosophy.
39
Good article. When I teach the Enlightenment (or Milton, for example) I always talk about the larger picture, the stereotypes and anti-semitism embedded, the assumptions these writers make that are very different from the ones we have and need now. I also, in teaching Enlightenment philosophers (I'm in an English Department, but teach philosophy and religion as well as history and literature in my courses), I teach Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise, and sometimes Mendelsohn's Jerusalem. And then there's the question: who did these philosophers consider capable of enlightenment?
15
"The Harvard philosopher William Hocking is alleged to have said that “the Jewish mind could not properly interpret and teach the philosophy and history of Western Christian civilization.”
Interesting.
Here is U.K. Labor Party leader, so respected by AOC in the US, commenting on British Jewry:
“[British Zionists] clearly have two problems,” he said. “One is they don't want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don't understand English irony either.”
There are two things to learn from Corbyn's anti-Semitism.
First, he uses "anti-Zionism" as a modern mask for his anti-Semitism, hence the grouping together of "British Zionists" instead of the more blatant label of "British Jews."
Second, Corbyn embraces the vision of the Jew as "eternal outsider" to Western civilization.
In this attitude, perhaps the author's thesis may be applied to Corbyn, and the progressive party in the UK and the "social Democrats" in the US, hiding behind the mask of "anti-Zionism," who are actually the successors to a history of racial prejudice set forth by,
Voltaire, Kant and Hume.
One can almost hear Jeremy Corbyn opining that a British Jew just somehow doesn't "get the irony" inherent in great philosophic minds, or in Western culture, and ought not be engaged in teaching such critical thought at university.
Brings a whole new perspective to the BDS boycott of Israeli universities in England and elsewhere.
4
There have been great thinkers for centuries. Most great thinkers thought at one time that the sun circled the earth. The Founders were great thinkers, but many of them owned slaves, women couldn't vote or own property, and the only men who could vote owned land. Our country was founded on a document that didn't recognize that all men are created equally and for statistical purposes Black people were 3/5 of a person.
The problem is that some Americans today still believe that not every adult should have the right to vote, the world was created a few centuries ago, and eve was created from Adams rib. Many Americans still don't believe that global climate change is real and a big problem.
And then we have Supreme Court Justices who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted by what people thought in the 18th century. Except they don't really think that when they have a political goal before them. They decided that half of the language of the 2nd Amendment should be ignored along with 200 years of precedent to flood the country with millions of guns. They also decided money was speech and corporations were people with religious rights. So much for enlightenment.
3
"Objective truth allows for the convergence of multiple observations and perspectives." Truth doesn't depend on where it comes from, and many great thinkers who have contributed much have been mistaken and their mistakes magnified by the culture or lack there of. The real trick is not allowing our own prejudices to dictate what is truth. I hear young people outright condemn a person's perspective because they find out that they were human and expressed the genius of their age, even if it wasn't genius.
Medieval philosophy was a terrific conversation between Jewish Christian, and Islamic thinkers. Actually, they all refer to one another's theories. You can't fully understand their work without this context.
However, as Dr. Shrage says, most philosophy teachers don't teach this, and many of them don't even know it. Typically textbooks will present medieval philosophy as a conversation between philosophy and Christian theology.
9
The study of philosophy should be concerned with the questions of how and why these thinkers defended these beliefs, not merely the fact that they did. Reducing the thoughts of the historical past to a list of facts like this has deeply damaged our common understanding of our history. The ancients are reduced to pre-scientific fools; the middle ages are reduced to unenlightened dogmatists; the moderns are reduced to prejudiced bigots. The essence of who these people actually were and how they built the edifice of philosophy upon which--and often against which--the present day now stands is largely lost in blithe statements of fact. Moreover in losing that understanding, we often lose track of ourselves in the process.
5
To break down the barriers between this cant and that cant and tackle human contradictions head on is an act of courage.
Now, as one of my grandchildren says sweetly at the dinner table, "May I have some more please?"
Next time she asks, I'll ask in turn,
"Have you finished your dinner?"
Not that it matters, for she has already taken the first step to enlightenment.
May she and all the other children show us the path to enlightenment.
1
Voltaire was hardly the model of a good man in general. He was sarcastic, vindictive and ungenerous. I am not a scholar of Hume but I have read some of his works and not encountered Jews there at all. I don't think it is a major theme. By the way, Samuel Johnson thought very ill of Hume because he was an avowed atheist. As for Kant, it is my understanding that he and Moses Mendelssohn were friends. Is this a case of "some of my best friends are Jews?" Maybe so, but if so, it is pretty soft, as anti-semitism goes.
Until fairly recently, writers felt free to opine on groups. We may not like that, but we might do well to understand that at the time when they did that it was acceptable, and to distinguish between "soft" prejudice and hard hate. Someone here mentioned Martin Luther. Now that's hard hostility to Jews and a milestone on the road to Auschwitz. In our own country, there is soft prejudice and hard racism. Soft prejudice is not good and creates all kind of unfairness, but it is not lethal. Hard hate is lethal. We want to eliminate soft prejudice, too, but understanding the difference between the two is important. Less important, but still important, is the ability to see historical figures in their times and places. People say that Lincoln was a racist but it is a meaningless statement unless placed into the context of his times, in which he was, on the contrary, a great hero of freedom.
9
Philosophy and racism, sexism, anti-semitism, etc. in the works of great philosophers?
Probably these problems will always exist in the works of the best philosophers, the best philosophers will always be accused of such, but paradoxically the best philosophers will also demonstrate the imagination to go beyond these problems.
The problem is this: Philosophy properly understood is not simply a narrow discipline in the modern sense but the project of arriving at a comprehensive, integrated, artistic/scientific, as well as action oriented human being. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle tried to embody all the knowledge of their time, and this is also what we mean by the Renaissance Man ideal. Philosophy properly speaking has always aimed at the superhuman. Not to produce a narrow, cramped, "philosopher" practicing a "discipline" in the modern sense.
Now with this understood we can see the best philosophers, trying to arrive at the sage, will probably always be highly critical of this or that race, sex, religion,--or all of them and everything together--not to mention this or that individual or type of such, because the goal is always beyond, but paradoxically the best philosophers will also be beyond these problems because they would be willing to arrive at the sage even if the sage is some strange multi-racial, bisexual, genetically designed creature (other species genes spliced in), so long as this being can deliver, be creative beyond the normal human being.
3
Perhaps the history of philosophy should be taught by history professors? This would free up philosophy professors to apply the Socratic method and engage students in rational dialogue on any topic without reference to any person or book. Would we not have a better chance of creating a more just and less bigoted world if we created an academic space where students are forced to confront their own beliefs and decide how to live their lives without appeals to authority or through deference to others?
9
This is ridiculous.
5
Running absolutely everything, including 300 year-old utterances, through the anti-Semitism detector is repugnant even to Jews.
What's the rest of the world supposed to make of it?
9
Heidegger, the Nazi party member and Hitler supporter deserves special emphasis. His "Being and Time" from the 1920s influenced many Western Philosophers. His lover, Hannah Arendt, did much to promote him despite her awareness of his Nazi connection.
He is current, the others not so much. All are despicable.
5
My high school in Brooklyn, Erasmus hall high school, had a very large Jewish population. That could mean 3000 people. Most of us went on to college. None of us ever made mention of the fact that Erasmus was one of the major historical antisemitic voices.
That was 1960s: would it be different today?
7
@LOL
Hey, my dad also went to Erasmus. He would have been 105 today. Jewish, knew about the anti-semitism, but in a world like ours, why make a big deal of it, as the saying went. That was before Hitler, before Israel, before most of America admitted that anti-semitism was part of this country, too. It hurt him. It hurts me to acknowledge the feeling that anti-semitism is too ingrained in our world to just go away. Stop reading any thinker/author because they're voicing anti-semitic notions en route to something else? Nah. But those notions should activate our own ability to think critically.
So now finally it is all in the open for the people to know. People, who have no time or no interest in reading history that many secular philosophers of Europe as some of them mentioned in this article as well as (and shamefully) quite literally ALL religious thinkers, theologians and Church Fathers have been antisemites with few recent exceptions, such as Pope John Paul of blessed memory and the current Pope, indeed a great man. But the damage has been done. In my opinion, ideas of White Supremacy and Ultra-Nationalistic views were the direct result of the hatred that existed for such a long period of time. I often wonder, if the Holocaust could ever occur without Luther's writings about Jews and the impact of the same on the German minds?
15
If we are going to ban the writings and thoughts of people deemed today as being anti-semitic, we should alo ban the writings of people deemed to be racists, misogynists, anti Asian, anti Latino, anti Irish...fill in the blanks. While we are at it, let's banish the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson owned slaves. In other words, lets ban the teaching, reading and thinking about almost every writer in history. If one reads the Christian Bible carefully there is a lot of racial and sexual prejudices in it. So should we ban the Bible?
Despite their prejudices many people have written and done great, important and enduring things throughout history.
6
My son, who is Jewish, attends DePaul, a Catholic university. Intro to philosophy is a requirement. He says his teacher has repeatedly discussed the anti-Semitism of the major philosophers. I don't believe she is Jewish. Kudos!
1
Gosh. I must have missed the part where the author called for banning these philosophers. All I saw was a question being asked: should students be made aware of the anti-Semitic views they espoused?
1
Christianity is a strange package. Jesus was a Jew as were his mother, father, and all relatives, friends, followers. His teachings were quite similar to those of Jewish prophets. Then a stranger, a Hellenized Jewish Roman citizen imposed himself on the survivors of Jesus followers, usurped the Jewish Law from Christianity allowing new Christians to join without converting and then adding a good dose of Greek afterlife superstition and a profound commitment to immanent annihilation. Paul and others believed that the Second coming would occur momentarily.
The notion that Christians could be anti Semitic is very perverse.
So is the idea that all non Jews are the non chosen people.
That Hume and Kant and Nietzsche were anti Semitic attests to the narrow weaknesses of their philosophies in the face of reality. What of our own special superior grasp of the truth? Is it complete? Do we imagine ourselves awake? Or are we approaching consciousness?
8
@Joseph Huben, actually Nietzsche was rather sympathetic toward Jews and admired their focus on the intellect. While on the other hand, he was rather hard on Christianity, a religion he felt that was derived from slaves. I think Nietzsche, while classified as a part of the western philosophical canon, was, is, and always will be in a class by himself.
All great philosophers, indeed all great thinkers in general, must be read critically. Sometimes they are ahead of their time, sometimes they are no better then their times, Sometimes they are worse than their times . Critical thinking requires us to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff, and never think that something is true just because a great thinker said it. Kant was wrong when he said the entire universe existed in our mind. He was also wrong when he said bad things about Jews. I don’t see there is any significant difference between acknowledging either fact.
10
@Teed Rockwell
“I don’t see there is any significant difference between acknowledging either fact”
The significant difference is thinking the universe is entirely in our minds, results in no real world consequences, while saying bad things about Jews does!
" “David Hume apparently accepted a polygenetic view of man’s origin, since in his ‘Natural History of Religion’ he made no effort to trace a linear development of man from the ancient Jews to the modern world, and presented practically no historical connection between Judaism and Christianity (which he saw more as emerging from pagan polytheism."
In fact, I just fact-checked this, and apparently what Hume wrote is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are ALL derived from pre-existing polytheism - not just christianity.
From a scientific point of view, that happens to be entirely correct.
So is there any Hume expert around here who can clarify what Hume actually writes in "Natural History of Religion", before we decide to call him a racist ... ?
6
When pointing out antisemitism in the works of philosophers, who rely on quotes from people who wrote about them rather than quoting the philosophers themselves. Why?
7
Western philosophy began as a pagan endeavor, and Christians wishing to understand themselves used or misused these pagan tools. Later philosophy often returned to the pagans to try to escape the influence of Christianity, and these attempts to escape Christianity helped give rise to modern science.
Christianity meanwhile had become entangled with modern states, which took many forms that worked together to discourage secularism and Judaism while struggling bitterly against each other. In all these struggles the Catholic Church occupied a unique position as an organization with real transnational secular power as well as religious authority, and a long tradition of censorship and persecution of ideas that undercut its authority.
Antisemitism had been used to keep Jews out of most areas of the economy; when these barriers collapsed or were removed, Jews exploded into these areas. Many of the Nazi Heidegger's most influential students were Jewish.
Philosophy's relation to the state, the market, religion, and women are more in need of confrontation than its relation to Judaism. And above all, philosophy needs to confront its attempt to ape science and escape from its own history and its own historical concerns with understanding who we are. This is especially urgent because social media is changing who we are faster and more thoroughly than ever before in our history, making involuntary solitude rare and making Truth inaccessible and impotent.
As climate change progresses, and population growth puts food and water out of reach of large portions of humanity, we are going to have to tackle the questions of why a handful only of societies, mostly White and Christian, can provide a middle class way of life including decent medical care, a social safety net, and a system of government that lets the voter have some say in war and taxes. It would also be a good idea to contemplate why European South and Central American colonies did not develop on a similar path to the prosperous and democratic societies of North America. This definitely is a philosophical question, so keep working, Prof. Shrage, and please don't get distracted by worrying about hurt feelings. Honest, I don't expect perfection in any of your philosophers, just be sure they are relevant to our problems today.
1
@Mary
1. The West became so rich by occupying, colonizing and exploiting the rest of the world, obviously.
2. We were able to do so because many of our political leaders lacked any serious moral values, whereas te invention of Western philosophy led to science, which led to extremely lethal weapons.
3. In the meanwhile, our economy is fully developed and we'll need immigrants to still be able to pay the retirement of baby boomers and ourselves, whereas all other economies are developing and are supposed to be fully developed by the end of this century too.
4. The only way to tackle climate change is for ordinary citizens in the West to learn how to think clearly, about fundamental concepts and ethics - in other words, to learn to philosophize - as it's the West that is responsible for climate change in the first place (the US has the largest carbon footprint per capita in the world).
4
@Mary
Jared Diamond's, Guns, Germs and Steel does a good job of attempting to explain the trajectory of Western Civilization by acknowledging the importance on the development of society by the occurrence or dearth of flora and fauna at particular locations. Let us not overlook the role of weather and climate in the development of various civilizations. He made it very clear from the outset that it was not race that determined the direction of the world's societies, but rather the interplay of the elements stated above.
2
Hume was skeptical of Christianity and Voltaire was an activist against the power of the Catholic Church: "écrasez l'infâme."
Catholic philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas had studied in depth both the Hebrew Testament, plus the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides ("the Rabbi" in Aquinas's commentaries), as well as Arab philosophers who had transmitted and commented upon Aristotle. Medieval Christian philosophy was explicitly multicultural, augmenting purely Christian thinking with Greek pagan, ancient Hebrew, Arab, and rabbinical Jewish sources, as well.
So, anti-Semitism was a form of anti-Christianism upon the part of Enlightenment philosophers. In particular, Voltaire employed a strategy of castigating Judaism (in its pre-Jewish Enlightenment phase) for its backwardness as a safe way of castigating powerful French Catholicism for its own backwardness by way of analogy.
11
@Steve Sailer
Right but we should make a distinction between anti-Judaism (opposition to a theology) and anti-semitism (hatred of a people).
Analogously, opposition to Israeli policies is distinct from anti-semitism.
3
How can one even begin to discuss Jews and Philosophy without mentioning Spinoza? Really?
Of course the whole point was that his views were considered heretical: as the wikipedia puts it: "Jewish religious authorities issued a herem (חרם) against him, causing him to be effectively shunned by Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books."
And for my part I do think it best to put the bosh on all "religious philosophy" as anything other than a historical interest. The whole point of the renaissance was to escape the cramp of exegetics -- that various philosophers could not bring themselves to do so entirely is evidence only that they feared what had happened to Galileo, or even Spinoza. They all lacked his willingness to support himself with a trade when the hand of patronage was bitten, and the tolerance of the Dutch.
Most of those who signed the American declaration of independence were Deists -- for a reason that modern Americans seem unwilling to remember: the horrors of the Catholic auto da fe were more than matched in the protesttant-catholic wars of Europe, and particularly Cromwell's revolution -- Cromwell's army killed an estimated 20% of the Irish suppressing the Catholics there ... with consequences that tie up Brexit today!
11
@Lee Harrison
Today, we can think of Spinoza as someone who would easily join the ranks of the American Transcendentalist and ecstatic naturalists like Alexander Von Humbolt.
2
As a member of an American Indian tribe, I find all these high fallutin' philosophical arguments kind of boring. From our vantage point, all "sides" of this so-called debate have a lot of reckoning to do with how they view and treat people of color in academia. Which is to say: Not great.
For example: How many Native philosophy professors do you know? (Hint: Yes, they exist. But you wouldn't know because you're too busy arguing about what dead guy Voltaire did or didn't do 250 years ago.)
I rest my case.
7
We are coming into a new era where excluded knowledge and its practitioners are being invited into the tent of "Western Civilization."
Jewish wisdom and wisdom seekers have continued to practice throughout history and up to the present time, although European wisdom seekers have excluded Jewish thought, except when it suited their narrow purpose, such as during the Reformation and the rise of science.
Please note that secularists and atheists among intellectuals accepted their culture's prevailing anti-Semitism and could not look beyond the horizon of their own age of thought.
We should NOT hide any anti-Semitism buried in their texts, because to do so would be to distort any truth we can excavate from the practice of history.
We need to teach what anti-Semitism is, how it arose, and whose interests it served. Unless we do this, we can never
educate fully any generation.
6
What about Nietzsche? And then one day that great philosopher Bannon?
2
@Max Green
The Nietzsche who disowned his own sister because she was an anti-Semite?
In her rush to condemn Voltaire to the identity politics dungeon reserved for anti-Semites, Prof. Shrage ignores the totality of this outspoken social philosopher's views on religion.
Significantly, Voltaire opened his notebook written in English by observing, "‘When I see Christians cursing Jews, methinks I see children beating their fathers. Jewish religion is the mother of Christianity, and grand mother of Mahometism."
True, in the course of his voluminous writing, Voltaire penned ugly anti-Semitic utterances, e.g. "Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd."
But his anti-Christian pronouncements -- ignored by Prof. Shrage -- are legion: "Of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most tolerance, but until now Christians have been the most intolerant of all men," and, "Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." (Spared from such blanket condemnations were members of the Society of Friends, a.k.a. Quakers, who apparently astonished Voltaire with their good will and tolerance.)
Late in life, Voltaire regretted his blanket anti-Semitic statements, admitting that he was "wrong to attribute to a whole nation the vices of some individuals."
Perhaps his truest view on religion comes from A Philosophical Dictionary (1824): "All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God."
11
@Richard
Points well taken but check the date, Voltaire started writing the "Dictionnaire Philosophique" in1752 and published it in 1764. Perhaps you're looking at a 19th century English translation in the Firestone Library?
1
If this is true, the Antisemitism of some of these authors is dreadful.
I just want to answer the question posed by the author--should we teach these authors without mentioning their anti-Semitic views?
I'd say we should unless it's relevant to the philosophical view involved (which it rarely is).
I agree, though, that great minds should have seen through Antisemitism.
2
My thought is, so what? Anti-semetism is as old as the first conquering army swept into the land of Judea. Let’s face it, it’s basically a bad location. It’s like living on the only road from North to South in the Eastern Mediterranean Middle East. Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Ottoman Turks all overran this small strip of land. The Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 69ad and moved most of the inhabitants to Rome as slaves. Christianity was officially created by The Roman Empire. The early Christians were Jews who followed a less strict version of Judaism. Jews became a minority class that was used as a scapegoat for just about anything the majority Christian leaders wanted. Even in the early American settlements, Jews were not allowed to own land. They made money by trading and offering services. They financed the Cotton trade as well as some of the American Revolution. I despise anti-semetism, racism, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination. To me, modern philosophy should focus on what all human beings have in common and not the divisive differences found in the past.
3
I find it a little odd that Prof Shrage makes such a big fuss over the supposed anti-Semitism of Enlightenment thinkers when many of the same individuals are on record stating vastly more disparaging things about blacks.
1
@frankly0
Or women
1
You could spent half a lifetime contemplating the diametrically opposed views of Kant and Hume which bear on the the nature of reality, consciousness and the basic building blocks of perception and experience. And then comes along a Jewish philosopher, Edmund Husserl, who unifies that Kant Hume dichotomy in what became known as phenomenology. The thing about these thinkers is that it takes real mental work to grasp what they are saying and to extract the implications. But the rewards are many. Your life will be better for the journey. But this entire article strikes me as just another exercise in anti-intellectualism filed under the rubric of laziness, like Trump defending neo-nazis because Washington owned slaves.
4
The author of this article does not cite a single work of moral philosophy by Kant (or for that matter Hegel) that contains anti-Semitic views.
7
“Mack, in his 2003 book ‘German Idealism and the Jew,’ wrote that Kant ‘attempted to remove Christianity’s Judaic foundations’ by recasting Christian history as a revolutionary or radical parting from Judaism. Mack noted that Kant, in his ‘Anthropology,’ called the Jews “‘ a nation of cheaters’ and depicted them as ‘ a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world.’ “
Two questions: how did Kant get around the fact that Jesus was a Jew and taught as a Jew to Jews, with every parable and commandment throughly rooted in Judaism, and did not the writer(s) of Genesis portray Jacob as the ultimate trickster?
The most vile anti-semiticism in philosophy that I've encountered was in Nietzsche's The Geneology of Morals. But we can go way back. Plato appears to be advocating genocide in the Republic, in order to clear the way for the collective rearing of children. We might want to revive Sartre's essay: "Anti-Semite and Jew" for its insight into the character of racism and White Nationalism. Also worth looking at is "How Fascism Works" and "How Propaganda Works" by American philosopher Jason Stanley.
1
One of the most important things I have learned from years of teaching and writing philosophy is the ability to respect people I disagree with. All the great philosophers are wrong about many many things. Studying philosophy consists of trying to judge what they got wrong and what they got right. if we insist that we can only study philosophers who say things we agree with, the entire discipline is destroyed.
I consider it almost criminally bad pedagogy to introduce a great philosopher to Women and students of color by starting off with writings in which they reveal themselves as being as bigoted as their contemporaries. This will poison the students‘ ability to appreciate how these thinkers were greater than the rest of their time, and our time as well. Let them find out about these weaknesses after they have learned to appreciate the philosopher’s strengths
8
Once again the comment section outshines the article. (I sometimes feel like “article” is growing a patina of negative connotation no?)
When I studied most of these thinkers I was made aware of their biases, failings and historical location - in particular Heidegger which was hard for me because he is one of my favorites. But Wittgenstein? That’s news.
There have been some great articles posted about this in The Stone before (one in particular on Kant in the print Reader that I can’t remember the name of now).
Though this article is well intentioned there is just way too much happening in here. Exactly what philosophy is not about.
8
If you want to teach history, teach history, warts and all. But if you want to teach philosophy, teach the ideas, not the people. Include only those good ideas that are important to philosophical thought today.
6
@Ernie Cohen: Let us teach all philosophy so that we can understand and learn from the past.
2
@Ernie Cohen
ALL philosophical concepts invented in the past are important to philosophical thought today, not only because studying them in depth is what shows you how to build a philosophical concept (= how to become an "artisan"), but also because many of them are implicitly present in what we tend to call so proudly (= prior to any serious history of philosophy course) "our" opinions.
So the question here is rather: was anti-Semitism part of those philosophies' main concepts or not?
If yes, studying those philosophies helps us to see on what intellectual premisses racism is based, so that we have the tools to investigate the racist presuppositions on which our own philosophies are based. And if no, studying those philosophies simply remains crucial to learn how to philosophize, it's just that in that case it's good to know that certain racist prejudices were taken over even by our greatest philosophers - which is yet one more reason to stop fighting against racism by trying to fight against "racists" (= inherently bad people), and to fight against racism itself, AS an ideology, and ideology that most people who adopt racist behavior aren't even aware of is underling their behavior.
3
It's a long, slow, crooked process to get away from the menaces that plagued some of our greatest thinkers, after we become aware of those character failures. But we do, and it helps to recall those foibles, even as we teach and find pleasure in teaching, e.g., Hume's Treatises. I'm glad that meye colleagues are working through--trying to work through-- these dissonant chords. In law and esp. politics, we suffer through these confounds almost everyday. Thanks for the piece.
2
So I conclude that it's ok to keep teaching the philosophy of these individuals as long as we include a disclaimer that they didn't sufficiently acknowledge the contributions of Jewish philosophers and maybe weren't very sanguine about the worth of Jews generally. How does this contribute to philosophy or the teaching of philosophy? This seems like a real reach to find a problem that is not so much a problem, or at least not a problem that's holding back philosophical inquiry.
5
@John Yeah, good question, but only if we separate the philosopher from his life from all relevance. I don't it's holding back (and maybe I missed that) but it is a meta-ethical issue--sometimes the hardest kind to resolve. See my response above.
I wonder whether Hegel would have elaborated his dialectic philosophy without direct or indirect influence of the mystical kabbalist dialectics of Isaac Luria with its idea that God created the world via self-contraction, we may even say self-negation. Kabbala influenced Christian thinkers, especially mystics, in several ways.
1
Philosopher like everybody else in society cannot escape the culture in which they grew up and the studies they did. The study of the human thoughts is a continuous evolution and we cannot take away the contribution that Voltaire (or anyone of the mentioned philosophers) has had on the progress of civilization because of what he has written on certain matters. We evolve and so should our mind and thoughts.
9
Ms Shrage has, in the best tradition of philosophy, provoked many intelligent and interesting responses. A sort of "Symposium" exposing (and defending) the limitations of the Western philosophical canon. Hats off to her and The Times. And by the way, what about Plato and those slaves ? Keep on digging, philosophers. That's the job description.
4
I am surprised to see Wittgenstein included unambiguously on the author's list of "great thinkers with anti-Semitic views" together with Kant, Voltaire, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Heidegger, since unlike those, Wittgenstein himself identified as a Jew (it is a matter of fact that he had 3 Jewish grandparents), and moreover, his own writings about Judaism and its effect on his thinking has never really been clarified and remains the subject of much debate (see for example the article by David Stern at https://clas.uiowa.edu/sites/clas.uiowa.edu.philosophy/files/DavidGStern-21-WasWittgensteinaJew.PDF among others).
16
One of my favorite philosophers was, unfortunately, also a vicious anti-Semite: Gottlob Frege, whose work anticipated the whole field of analytical philosophy of mathematics and language-- Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, the whole crowd. When he wasn't writing about the metaphysical nature of subjects, objects, meanings, numbers, and arithmetical functions, he was trying to figure out how his country could expel all the Jews once and for all.
6
@HandsomeMrToad
This is more than a little misleading. Frege never gave any public expression to any of these ideas, which were not only antisemitic but anti-Catholic and anti-democratic. They occur in diary entries written exclusively after WWI, in the 1920s. In fact, he remarks in those entries that he had formerly held liberal views, which he had come to regard as mistaken. And there is evidence from his former students that he did hold such views before WWI.
I suspect that Frege, like many German academics of time, had bought into the nonsense that Germany had been stabbed in the back.
3
@HandsomeMrToad Nice to see this pointed out -- I kept thinking, reading through this essay, when is she going to get to Frege?!
We now know that everything Plato and Aristotle wrote was wrong. Teach cosmology, relativity and quantum theory instead.
2
@Irving Franklin
Any concrete example of Platonism or Aristotelianism that science has proven wrong today?
No, I suppose.
One of the things that are central to those philosophies, is that you shouldn't take over someone else's opinion without verifying it ... ;-)
4
@Ana Luisa
Well, as a matter of fact, Aristotle writes that a projectile moves forward in a straight line until its energy is exhausted, then falls straight down.
You suppose wrongly.
2
@Ana Luisa
Aristotle theorized that the basic elements making up the world were earth, air, fire and water. Wrong.
He held that the cosmos consisted of concentric spheres with earth at the center. Wrong.
2
While we are at it, we should recognize the contribution of the great Arab philosophers, Averroes and Avicenna, who also contributed to the development of western thought.
17
Walter Mehring (a german author and poet, persecuted by the Nazis) examines similar topics extensively in his remarkable book “The Lost Library” from 1951. In it (among other things) he follows anti-semitic threads from german folklore through the thinking of the Enlightenment, illuminating the ways these ideas enabled the rise of fascism in Europe. The book’s overall thesis is, of course, much more complex than this but what he writes about is alarmingly relevant today and well worth reading.
5
Bravo. Thank you.
This has bugged me for a long time. Before the intelligentsia and the Church Jews have been trapped in a long, long nightmare.
Don't forget, Greece and Rome made war on the Jews and Rome destroyed Judea.
Still, we stand accused of murdering their god.
And we've inherited the mantle of wanderer, since our country was savaged, so as stateless people we are "the other," of course our modern state is condemned routinely - sometimes justifiably, mostly not considering the fact that the Middle East is a war zone fraught with anti-democratic and violent upheavals, and antisemitism there is rampant and obvious.
Yet people refuse to see this.
15
yes, the Jews have been vilified for "murdering" Jesus. If it were true that Jews murdered him, why aren't Christians thanking them. Central to their religion is the crucifixion and resurrection. The crucifiers allowed Jesus to fulfill his destiny. Without that they would not have their religion.
2
“With the resurgence of old hatreds in the 21st century, philosophers are challenged to think about the ways we trace the history of our discipline and teach our major figures, and whether our professional habits and pieties have been shaped by religious intolerance and other forms of bigotry.”
What a fantastic point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
1
"Voltaire challenged the biblical account of human history by asserting that only the Jews were descendants of Adam, and “everybody else pre-Adamites"
We know that as a document about the history of mankind and the history of Judaism, the Ancient Testament contains a lot of false or unverifiable stories.
I don't see how you can call somehow who rejects the story of Adam being the first man, a racist, simply because the Torah claims that he was. In fact, today we know that man's ancestors are much older than the Jewish population, so it makes perfect sense to imagine that there were non-Jews before what Jews considered to be the first man, as they imagined that Adam, their first man, was born about 6,000 years ago.
"though the non-European ones were degenerate or inferior to the European ones. Voltaire saw the Adamites as a major menace to European civilization, since they kept infecting it with what he considered the horrible immorality of the Bible. Voltaire therefore insisted that Europe should separate itself from the Adamites, and seek its roots and heritage and ideals in the best of the pre-Adamite world — for him, the Hellenic world.”
How would Richard Popkin, who claims this about Voltaire without quoting him, reconcile his interpretation of Voltaire with the fact that in his Treatise on Tolerance, he depicts a very positive view of Jews as perfectly tolerant people ... ?
Or as Popkin is dead already, how would the author of this op-ed do so?
9
“David Hume apparently accepted a polygenetic view of man’s origin, since in his ‘Natural History of Religion’ he made no effort to trace a linear development of man from the ancient Jews to the modern world, and presented practically no historical connection between Judaism and Christianity (which he saw more as emerging from pagan polytheism).”
Uh ... today, science has proven that the hypothesis that traces "a linear development of man from the ancient Jews to the modern world" is wrong. The first man was African, not Jewish.
We also know that for tens of thousands of years, there were FOUR "homo sapiens" species, and it's only since 40,000 years that our species is the only that survived. And we know that there has been sexual intercourse between those species, so we literally have "polygenetic origins", as a species (in all senses of the word "polygenetic").
Also, why would claiming this somehow be racist or anti-Semitic?
As to claiming that Christianity is more linked to pagan polytheism than to Judaism: from a cultural, purely religious, and liturgical point of view, that's obviously false. But from a philosophical point of view, it actually makes quite a lot of sense, as 90% of Christian philosophy (and as a consequence theology) is derived from Neoplatonism and Aristotle - as transformed by Muslim monotheist philosophers. The influence of Jewish PHILOSOPHERS is clearly much smaller.
So to call him a "polygenetic racist" on this basis is a quite weak argument.
11
@Ana Luisa
Additional christian nods to polytheism include the doctrine of the trinity and the worship of Mary and numerous saints.
1
Has Prof. Shrage even read Voltaire, Hume and Kant? She quotes only secondary sources in her argument.
Her animadversions against the brightest beacons of the enlightenment are outlandishly contradictory to the spirit of that era. Think of the "Lettres Persanes", contemporary with Voltaire. Their main point was to critique aspects of European culture by imagining the impressions that they would make on Persians. It was an effort to see oneself through the eyes of the other. Same for Montaigne. Are we to abandon the giants of the enlightenment in favor of the two or three carping critics cited by Shrage?
Shrage, by citing only secondary sources, makes herself a tertiary source. She is a tertiary source in search of justification for tribal angst even in the most unlikely places. Reading Voltaire, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein (!!! he was jewish) does not breed anti-semitism. Reading them is much more likely to encourage free-thinking and appreciation for the complexities common to humanity.
74
"the history of Western philosophy is usually presented as a form of inquiry that began with the ancient Greeks and Romans, then jumps to medieval Christian Europe, and picks up again when modern European Christians struggled with religious reform and the rise of secularism and science. When we reiterate this trajectory, are we reinforcing Hume’s, Voltaire’s and Kant’s purging of Judaism from European history and the history of Western thought and values?"
Obviously, as long as a history of WESTERN philosophy includes all major Western Jewish philosophers, such as Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Putnam, Derrida etc., the answer is no. And I never saw any contemporary overview that does not include them.
Most histories of Western philosophy I saw even included Arab and Muslim medieval philosophers, who were absolutely fundamental for the rise of medieval Christian philosophy.
So who would those Jewish philosophers that histories of Western philosophy don't mention be, more precisely?
And then we're not even talking yet about the fact that the influence of for instance Maimonides on Western philosophy has clearly been much more limited than that of Averroes or Avicenna, both names who as soon as medieval philosophy is mentioned, are mentioned too (Thomas Aquinas and many others constantly mention them themselves, wrote comments on their works etc.).
So what is the author of this op-ed actually talking about?
10
@Ana Luisa I humbly disagree. She is talking about philosophers from Maimonides and Spinoza to Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig -- religious theorists discarded from the canon and cast with "Jewish Philosophy." She is also talking about religious tracts like the Talmud. She is, I'm sure, not talking about those with Jewish Ancestry (Wittgenstein) whose philosophy does not drawn on Jewish tradition as that would be silly. When you say that the "influence" of certain of these philosophers has been more limited, that seems to rather assume the conclusion that they are outside of the canon--which is the question at issue.
4
@Theodore Bindell
With all respect, I don't know any history of philosophy that doesn't include Spinoza (if it's a very short history) or Maimonides and Buber (if the book contains a bit more pages).
Do you?
And most major Western philosophers refer to Spinozism too.
And of couse, neither the Bible nor the Torah nor the Quran are part of histories of philosophy, because they are not philosophy in the first place.
And if philosophers "with Jewish Ancestry" such as Wittgenstein don't count, then WHO are those great Western Jewish philosophers that the West would have systematically neglected, out of sheer racism? Why isn't the author of this op-ed at least naming them ... ?
And the reason why Maimonide is a "smaller" philosopher than Spinoza has nothing to do with his religion, and everything with the fact that he didn't invent a philosophy that is as deep and original as that of Spinoza. The exact same thing goes for many other philosophers contemporary to Maimonides - Christian philosophers, that is, such as Adelard of Bath for instance.
By the way, the 20th century philosopher most cited in secondary literature is ... Jew Ludwig Wittgenstein.
If anti-Semitism was part of the very CORE of Western philosophy, how could that be possible?
I'm all for questioning the racism that might be present in great Western philosophers, but you do have to PROVE that it's central to their philosophy. And if it isn't, why calling their philosophies essentially racist?
1
@Ana Luisa
Thank you for your posts explaining it is Muslim medieval philosophers and Christians like Thomas Aquinas are the basis of modern western.
I did not realize how irrelevant and limited Jewish philosophers are in western philosophy.
I found several recent publications and books by Professor Pasnau expounding on your historical corrections of Shrage. Other readers might find enlightening.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/novemberdecember/feature/the-islamic-scholar-who-gave-us-modern-philosophyoughts
2
Not a problem. Let's find perfect philosophers and only use them, not the others. Because we can only teach perfectly about perfection, thus depriving students of the ability to figure out for themselves that most philosophers were human and imperfect. Next step, Jung and his mandala fantasies. Good luck.
12
@John F I may be wrong, but I don't believe it is suggesting we never teach these philosophers. Rather it's suggesting we include some context. Specifically we include the fact that these philosophers were antisemitic. The reason we include this in the discussion is because antisemitism (and other forms of hatred for that matter) are insidious, and knowing about their views may inform our understanding of their philosophy.
8
@John F Turns out Jung was also of the opinion that Europe need a non-Jewish form of psychoanalysis -- Freud's version was just too Jewish for the Aryans, or so thought Jung.
1
If Hume, Voltaire and Kant espoused these anti-Semitic theories presenting them as truth, their entire bodies of work should be re-examined. If Christianity is so removed from Judaism, how did Jesus of Nazareth and his teachings lead to a new religion? I am not aware that he was ever inclined to reject his religion as much as see another way to follow Jehovah's intent for man and to begin a way to do it. Perhaps the Europe of Hume, Voltaire and Kant demanded this of them to avoid being marginalized. I am being kind but we see political and social pressures in today's world that enable people to more easily ascribe to horrible ideas just to survive their political and religious environments. Maybe philosophy should work to integrate east and west and the different philosophies that have developed across the world and throughout history.
3
Also important to remember the antisemitism of Martin Luther.
16
Thinkers like Kant, Voltaire, Hume? Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger? Spare me. A waste of time, the whole lot. Study science, mathematics, history, economics, literature, art, music. Woody Allen got it right in his "Critique of Pure Dread", years ago.
2
@David A. I pretty much agree. I studied quite a bit of philosophy in college, and I benefited from the ancient thinkers a bit, I think - Plato, Aristotle. Political philosphy can be beneficial, I think. But the people on your list? Never benefited much at all. I concede, some of it I don't understand, not sure if that's my fault, or if everyone else doesn't understand either and are just pretending to. But I get the gist of these guys . . . not really edifying.
2
@David A.
What studying those philosophers learns you to do, is to philosophize, which is a very specific method of thinking, allowing you to discover your own prejudices on many different levels, and to create new concepts on issues that are of vital political importance.
An example of such concepts: the separation of state and church (to stay with Kantism for a moment).
Of course, you won't discover this method by just trying to read ancient philosophical texts, you do need someone who shows you how to do so. And unfortunately, since the US philosophy departments massively switched to "analytical philosophy", finding such a person became extremely rare. Instead, students are told to study not those texts but mere summaries, which reduce philosophy to its opposite: opinions. And then indeed studying the history of philosophy becomes extremely boring, rather than being an exercise in learning how to philosophize. And once that's the case, you don't see the difference between philosophizing and have a debate of opinions anymore. So philosophy looses its specificity ... and democracy one of its main tools to obtain citizens capable of "thinking for themselves", as Kant called it.
4
@David A.
It would be a very impoverished study of history and literature that omitted Voltaire and Hume. They are two of the greatest wits and most lucid writers in their respective languages and they had profound influences on their times and on the times that followed.
Kant is probably only worth the effort if your pleasure is acquiring esoteric vocabulary and dwelling on the possibility that time and space are imposed on reality by our minds.
There has been an ongoing debate among anglo-american thinkers as to whether Heidegger's works were a) mostly gibberish or b) entirely gibberish.
Furthermore, it will be hard to avoid Descartes if you want to dodge philosophers and just study mathematics.
4
As Christianity spread in the first centuries CE, most Jews continued to reject that religion. As a consequence, by the 4th century, Christians tended to regard Jews as an alien people who, because of their repudiation of Christ and his church, were condemned to perpetual migration (a belief best illustrated in the legend of the Wandering Jew). When the Christian church became dominant in the Roman Empire, its leaders inspired many laws by Roman emperors designed to segregate Jews and curtail their freedoms when they appeared to threaten Christian religious domination. As a consequence, Jews were increasingly forced to the margins of European society.
Enmity toward the Jews was expressed most acutely in the church’s teaching of contempt. From St. Augustine in the 4th century to Martin Luther in the 16th, some of the most eloquent and persuasive Christian theologians excoriated the Jews as rebels against God and murderers of the Lord. They were described as companions of the Devil and a race of vipers. Church liturgy, particularly the scriptural readings for the Good Friday commemoration of the Crucifixion, contributed to this enmity. Such views were finally renounced by the Roman Catholic Church decades after the Holocaust with the Vatican II declaration of Nostra aetate (Latin: “In Our Era”) in 1965, which transformed Roman Catholic teaching regarding Jews and Judaism.
Despite that change in Catholic teachings Jews are still reviled by Catholics and other Christians.
6
@Jay
Jews are still reviled by SOME Catholics and other Christians (and some Muslims).
I'm quite sure that if you ask most Catholics today whether Jewish exegesis of the Bible is more material/literal than Christian exegesis (as Augustine and many Christian leaders - falsely -claimed for centuries, indeed), they won't have any idea of what you're talking about ... ;-)
2
@Jay: [ ...by the 4th century, Christians tended to regard Jews as an alien people.... ]
By the 4th century, the Christians were converted pagans who had turned the Judaism of Christianity's founders on its head and the Jews were from another continent.
1
Shouldn’t studies in philosophy should start with Jainism, the earliest development that may be called religion? Then proceed with the developments of the “first axial age” - beginning roughly around the time of the writing of the Vedas and the early Jewish history recounted in the Torah. Although these lines of thought do not connect to the general trend of western thought until the advent of Christianity, they represent the beginnings of the written attempt by man to discern the reality behind our perception of the world, which is the perennial quest of philosophy. The Hellenic thought and also Buddhism come later.
But to leave Judaism out is absurd, because more than Plato and Aristotle, it is the basis of Western ethics.
4
@Mr. Little
Wrong. Common mistake, but wrong. Religion is the basic for morals, not ethics. Ethics started with Socrates and Plato precisely because they questioned religion.
And Socrates paid the ultimate price for that.
6
I am puzzled by Laurie Shrage's piece. Initially I was repelled by the competition she has joined. Today every ethnic group seems to be terrified that it will lose its place in the race to show that it has been more victimized than other identity groups. Truly, there is no higher status status in America today than that of victim.
But when I looked more closely I was even more puzzled. Shrage faults Hume for failing to draw a historical connection between Judaism and Christianity. But what has that got to do with antisemitism? Since Hume was not a Christian, presumably such a link might have lowered his opinion of Judaism, not improved it. Hume said that if he broke his neck, no more than one in 50 Englishmen would not rejoice. Some because he was a Tory, some because he was a Whig, some because he wasn't a Christian, and all of them because he was a Scotsman.
So too for Voltaire. Shrage claims that he downplayed the influence of Judaism on European history. Not so, as Shrage herself seems to admit later. Judaism laid the foundation for Christianity which Voltaire despised. She says that Voltaire saw Judaism as a menace to European civilization, since it "kept infecting it with what to he considered the horrible immorality of the Bible." Evidently, far from downplaying its influence, he may have exaggerated it.
These thinkers' "antisemitism" seems to be a backhanded compliment to the influence of Judaism and is largely derivative of their hostility to Christianity.
54
@Ian Maitland
Oh my goodness. Do you honestly not see why it's important that the Jewish lineage of Christianity is erased?
You take for granted, I guess, the power of a state religion comprised of billions of followers, and based in part upon the usurpation of a people and their philosophy, the destruction of their state and ultimately their condemnation not only as inferior but damned. For century upon century Jews have been accused of killing god. Jews are blamed for crimes against nature, crimes against the state, crimes against priests, and relegated at best to second class status - at worst to Hell.
You know how people say, "check your privilege?" Check your privilege.
2
Come up with a carefully designed curriculum that is the mental equivalent of baby formula, for the non reading public mob so that they don't run rampant and destroy the world, if you must. Open libraries full of uncensored books of every description are exactly correct for the rest of us.
Censorship is more evil than any prejudice or bad value held by any collection of unlearned people.
13
Excellent article, Professor Shrage. As a philosopher myself, I have always found the almost "overseen" anti-Semitism of Heidegger, the way he actively proposed and implemented the "Fuhrer principle" in the University, to be shocking. Fortunately, writers like Emmanuel Faye, in his "Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy" takes this issue head on. I am pleased that others within the Western canon - Voltaire, Kant, Hume - are exposed. Hegel's writings on Africans is atrocious. These are things we must teach, for excluding them excludes the actual written work of these philosophers - Hegel centers his theory of History around the "Development of Spirit" which does not include "Africans" - because they have failed to "confront nature." Central to the tenets of many Western philosophers are manifolds of dubious racism. Thank you.
4
@Tony Cochran
“... as a philosopher myself,...”
Jesus, Mary and Jung, get a job.
This is a revealing essay. My family often wondered why Morton White, an eminent philosopher and my mother's cousin, changed his name from Weisberger to White. The answer now is clear. He wanted a job.
13
Excellent work and good questions are raised here, as well as a lot of good and thoughtful answers; I'd like to say that we should probably let sleeping dogs lie--there's a reason those ideas have been forgotten to history and the better ideas prevailed; in a sense, to teach the bad ideas is to make them more abundant and available, contributing to their following--if there's one thing the internet has taught me, it's that all you have to do is put information out there, and it'll find a niche following on it's own.
It's not so much that we don't want to face the facts that Hume had some bad beliefs, it's that those beliefs are so bad that they don't deserve the time of day in modern society and actually should be forgotten. I don't see it as much of white-washing history as forgetting ideas that haven't merited a place in history.
8
Modern art, design and architecture are clearly a fusion of the industrial revolution AND the opening of Japan in the middle of the 19th century. The work of Piet Mondrian and the DeStilh group are a perfect illustration of this.
Yet many museum show catalogs in the recent past have traced
Mondrian's work as fully developing from European art and giving little if any mention of the art of China and Japan.
3
It may be difficult to determine substantive intent from writers 200-300 (or more) years ago. At the University of Chicago where I'm an alum, a presentation by an English professor asserted that Shakespeare was an "anti-semite" (which doesn't really mean anything any more, as it is a term so opportunistically abused) because of his treatment of Shylock in The Taming of the Shrew ("Shakespeare's Prejudices: Shrews and Jews" October 2012, Humanities Day, Richard Strier). One must simply accept that a number of racial, ethnic, religious, ideological, national, sexual, political and economic classifications were--and are--abundantly applied in the course of social, linguistic and other constructs. At any rate, Gadamer may have settled the issue rationally (from Stanford): "prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood. In this way (they) can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Heidegger’s Being and Time (they are) ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is...the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped." So, that might make "anti-anti-semitism" the actually and more applicable, prejudice? Regards.
5
@Matt Andersson
Shylock was in Merchant of Venice - not Taming of the Shrew.
@Matt Andersson You really ought to read the plays again. The only play Shylock appears in is 'The Merchant of Venice,'and his conversion to Christianity at the end of the play provides the climax of the story. The providing of reasons to hate and exclude Jews by all of the philosophers in this article is nothing more than justification for antisemitism in European Society. The ultimate end of the tale, which is intentionally left out of the evaluation is that all those ideas reached fruition in the work of Adolf Hitler and his German monsters the Nazis.
2
@Matt Andersson. That’s all very interesting except for the fact that the classification of “antisemitism” is grounded in falsehood rather than in any kernel, no matter how small, of truth. It is a warped worldview for people who are disappointed by their lot in life and need to blame someone for it.
And for what it’s worth, allow me to correct you, Shylock appeared in The Merchant of Venice - I’m guessing that thinking ahead to the article you cite (Shrews and Jews) caused your error.
1
If I may be permitted a nit, a professor of philosophy should not indulge in false generalization, as Ms. Shrage does in titling this article "Confronting Philosophy's Anti-Semitism". "Philosophy" cannot be found running around lose in the universe full of anti-Semitic views, as those are alive and well only in the heads of people who entertain them (agreed that thought can be reduced to writing, but is dormant until read by a person competent to understand it). There is much philosophic thought going on, and that has gone on, that is not anti-Semitic in the least. The broad brush used by Ms. Shrage does the subject a disservice.
15
@poppajohnl, in Shrage's defense, opinion pieces are often titled by the editors of the page.
3
'... as Ms. Shrage does in titling this article "Confronting Philosophy's Anti-Semitism".'
The author of a newspaper article or OpEd almost never writes the headline. The nit you would pick is with the Times.
If you read beyond the headline, you will see that Shrage does not make the mistake you are pointing out.
1
I have always had a problem of anachronistic judgments, and the movement by some to vilify some of history’s greatest minds by today’s standards. That is why some students label people like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson as racist when, in the context of their time and zeitgeist, they were anything but.
To perhaps make use of an “extreme” example, the works of Martin Heidegger often suffer from the stigma of Heidegger being a member of the Nazi party. This is certainly a stain on his character and reputation, but does nothing to take away from the brilliance and relevance of his greatest work Being and Time.
This is not about giving anyone a “free pass” but I truly believe that some of these great thinkers, had they lived long enough, would have reformed their views as they became more enlightened over time.
10
@Michael Adcox
You might rethink your excusing Jefferson from the charge of racism. Even a cusory reading of Jefferson’s writings and his behavior indicate a racist defense of slavery. Remember this man operated two plantations.
4
Philosophers’ -- not philosophy’s -- anti-Semitism! Spinoza suffices on the curriculum, not because he was a Jew, but because he’s great. Like Socrates, the local community rejected him: a badge of honor for a philosopher! Religious apologists can quibble about how “Jewish” his synthesis of mind and body was. But all these questions of cultural input and import are historically, but not philosophically, relevant. Maimonides was good, but not as great as the Sage of Amsterdam, who raised himself above the fray.
4
Unfortunately the two Jewish intellectual giants who revolutionized modern Western civilization--I refer to Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx--have not and never will be accepted by bourgeois academic departments of philosophy.
3
@Red Allover
In real life, both are mainly studied in the departments of philosophy and cultural studies today.
And did Freud "revolutionize" Western society, or did he never managed to prove psychoanalysis (as he himself admitted, at the end of his life) precisely BECAUSE it was so embedded in Western culture, and confounded that culture with how the mind itself operates? It's because it's the latter that seems to be true that Freud is now more studied as philosopher than as psychologist/doctor, today.
8
@Red Allover
Departments of philosophy are not in the business of "accepting" particular thinkers or particular theories. They are in the business of presenting and analyzing theories and arguments so that students may learn to work through difficult ideas and learn to think for themselves.
Anyway, Freud was primarily a psychologist and Marx was primarily an economic/social theorist. It's fair to treat them primarily in bourgeois academic departments other than that of philosophy.
5
Both Freud and Marx created religions. As with all religions, they attracted legions of believers. The number of adherents does not make anything that they said true.
2
If it helps to make anyone feel better about their forebears, in two hundred years our offspring will look back at our 21st century equivalents of cave paintings and ask themselves how they could possibly be the product of family lines that contain such ignoramuses.
8
@NormanDypuis: I share your optimistic projection of offspring 2 generations and hundreds of years from now. And of course, inquiring eager minds will assume we knew so very little....
1
One of the funny things that we learn over the passing of time, is that nobody really knows what they're talking about. The philosophers dig deeper but they aren't even close. As long as we know this, it's ok to study philosophy. If that study leads to subscribing, probably better to do something else. In today's world it's stupid to think the things that Kant thought while he was around. This is not to say that his thoughts didn't make any impact. In our world,If a person happens to be Semetic, they are like every other person. Being Semetic doesn't really mean what it used to mean.Kushner is Orthodox, does that mean anything? Only a few people care.
3
One chief problem here is equating philosophy with activity that goes on in an academic environment. The world ain’t divided up the way academic departments are. Academic philosophy departments do not have dibs on philosophy, nor is what goes on there “the best of philosophy,” as classical music is apparently “the best” music. Social stratification is alive and well in academia.
We would all be better advised to see philosophy as persuasion, as does the bookish guy Carlin Romano (America: The Philosophical). Philosophy in this larger and more generic sense goes on all the time, almost everywhere—even in the pages of The New York Times—or, for that matter, The Enquirer.
I’m not sure if academics should get out more, or if they should better cloister themselves. Perhaps the problem is that too many think of themselves as special, perhaps because they’re smart, or lucky, or hard-working, or because they perform some special role in society. Whatever reason they think they’re special (actually, don’t all communities? America itself thinks it’s special)—they ain’t. They don’t have dibs on persuasion. Some are good at it, some ain’t. Some who were or are anti-Semitic may be persuasive with regard to other matters, but it makes one pause—hopefully.
2
I understand that many figures in history (including the history of philosophy) held view that most people would (including me) consider immoral, from the ancient Greeks through the 20th Century. When I discuss such figures such as Kant and Hume in the classroom, I briefly mention some of these concerns. But ideas must be considered on their own merits: the fact that Hume expressed unacceptable anti-Semitic views does not mean the we must automatically reject any consideration of any of his ideas in epistemology or other fields. We must examine the ideas themselves without an ad hominim attack on the source.
And the comment about Ludwig Wittgenstein is somewhat misleading. The Wittgensteins were a Jewish family that had become secularized and assimilated into the mainstream culture in Vienna. With the rise of Hitler, the Jewish ancestry became and issue, and in 1938 the family had to purchase a "Befreiung" to reclassify the family members remaining under German control (sisters Hermine and Helene) from Jewish to fully German. I am aware of Ludwig's comments from 1931 that have a somewhat anti-Semitic tone (which can be found in the book "Wittgenstein's Poker" by Edmonds and Eidinow (Harper Collins, 2001)). I don't think one off-hand comment about how European Jews may be regarded in European history is sufficient to cast Wittgenstein as anti-Semitic, especially given the the events that followed with the rise of Hitler.
12
Although anti-semitism is the flavor
these days, the argument can be
extended to include other civilizations.
The contribution of Muslims to science,
philosophy, literature and that of Chinese
and Indians are often ignored. It is a
general trend not limited to Jews only.
Besides philosophy, literature has similar
biases. Shakespeare has dose of
anti-semistism in Merchant of Venice.
should his works be banned or taught
with critism of his biases. Also, it is
not just Christian philosophers or
writers but biases and prejudices
are common among human beings.
Do Jews don't have any biases or
prejudices? Do Muslims, Buddhists,
Hindus, communists are free from biases. Looks like we are seeing anti-semitism everywhere while we rough
up hispanics on our borders.
10
According to our criteria, Kant wrote very unfortunate things about:
- the Jews (although he had a huge respect for Mendelssohn and to some degree Maimon)
- the “First Nations” and other ethnicity/tribes
- the women
- Etc… (you pick the topic according to the fashion of the moment and how you want to position yourself)
This article is not simply one of the periodical repetition of old arguments that were fully developed and exhausted in the late Seventies (at least in Europe), a repetition that may itself be quite opportunistic. It is also totally unphilosophical. In philosophy, “Kant” (or Hume or Luxembourg, etc) is to the name of a person. It’s the name of a system of concepts. The sentences that may seem shocking to us are philosophicaly totally meaningless if they are just the opinion of a person. They gain their philosophical meaning only when situated in the whole structure of the system. That’s the first step: situate them in the transcendental anthropology (no I did not mean “pragmatic”). Then situate this anthropology within its time. At this point, and opposite everything this article suggests, you may have learn something about “Kant”, that is a specific rational structure meant to understand the world. It’s all about your concept of philosophy: a collection of opinions by someone famous, or a rational structure. The overwhelming prevalence of social history as a paradigm for history of philosophy is only the former in disguise.
4
Anti-Semitism is a tragedy and was a tragedy and must not be hidden. We need to understand the limits in Kant's thinking... As for Kant's thinking, we also need to realize that Western philosophy is slanted as such, for there is the Eastern world to always consider.
3
Are their biases and prejudices and anti-Semitism not already discussed? I did a BA in philosophy, in the US, and this reads like suggesting philosophy students are unaware Aristotle thought slavery was natural or that Nietzsche was a misogynist. Trust me, students are *quite* aware. The question then whether these reprehensible positions are integral to their work is precisely the highest standard that can be applied to them, isn't it? You're suggesting that students be informed Heidegger was a Nazi. OK, done. Now what? Your ideas here don't go any deeper.
18
As a philosopher, I find any discussion of the subject refreshing. However this essay would be very misleading to anyone not familiar with the field.
Hume, Voltaire, and Kant are a very odd trio. Almost no course covers them all. Voltaire is probably not even considered a philosopher by most philosophers.
Kant is almost always studied, and it would be interesting to ask if he is somewhat over-rated and over-taught. He is often portrayed as THE philosopher of the Enlightenment.
But what readers should know, and isn't evident in this essay, is that his great works that are taught do not mention Judaism or Jews. No one in a philosophy class would know that he fell for many of the traditional European Christian beliefs of his day. So teaching him is not endorsing or spreading Antisemitism.
The claim about Hume is even more off-base. He is known, if anything, for being anti-Christian. He never got the recognition he deserved (or a teaching position) because he argued very forcefully (I would say definitively) that miracles do not exist, never existed, and are claimed to have happened as a deliberate way to mislead people into supporting a church. To paraphrase one of his prize quotes: "The greatest miracle in Christianity is that anyone believes it."
I would add that it is common to lump together three 'rationalists,' Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. So Spinoza, who was Jewish, is in the cannon.
38
@priceofcivilization
Excellent comment. In the entire Critique of Pure Reason I can recall no mention of Jews. Recently I wrote a paper on Hume and have been studying him for years and recall no mention of Jews.
Shouldn't anti-semites be promoting their views in their texts? Maybe Kant and Hume genuinely cared about epistemology.
9
After the 17th century, the philosphy as it was defined and existed up to that time was combined with the science as developed by Isaac Newton and others. The combination continued to be called "philosophy."
.
However, modern science describes a completely mechanistic universe - that includes the structure we call homo sapien. Certainly science has developed since Newton, supplementing his work with relativistic mechanics as described by Einstein, quantum mechanics as described by Planck, Heisenberg, de Broglie, Bohr and others. But science still describes a mechanistic universe - perhaps not deterministic - but still mechanistic.
In that light all discussion of moral right and wrong, free will, human initiative, and choice, becomes a discussion of msnomers.
.
I know this sounds depressing, but whether something is true or false has nothing to do with it being correct or incorrect.
4
@HH
Correction to my comment. Sorry for the typos.
In that light all discussion of moral right and wrong, free will, human initiative, and choice, becomes a discussion of misnomers.
I know this sounds depressing, but whether something is depressing or inspiring has nothing to do with it being correct or incorrect.
.
1
"And in general it is far more fruitful to try to understand why certain philosophers went astray than to neglect or scorn them." - Corliss Lamont, "The Philosophy of Humanism"
11
This is like asking if we can listen with pleasure to Richard Wagner despite his vicious anti-Semitism, or Ryan Adams despite his apparently using his pop-stardom boorishly.
The continuing relevance of Aristotelian moral philosophy does not depend on whether Aristotle thought women could be persons. It depends on whether Aristotle's ideas about personhood make sense if we grant that women and men are equally persons. The same distinction can, must, and should be tested for every philosophy produced by a human being.
Professor Schrage reminds us that the morality of the work and the morality of its maker are two different things.
16
Here's a suggestion for all those who feel that their history, art, philosophy, etc. ought to be purified of all imperfections. Try living in China and seeing what it's really like. As for me, I prefer my history, art, philosophy, etc. with all of its warts included. How else are we going to learn?
16
Certainly there are many teachable moments in all subjects that call upon us to investigate and discuss bias. They are important. Philosophy is no exception, but it is also a discipline that has repeatedly confessed it’s own shortcomings. Hume in “Of Miracles” takes all religions to task for one kind of magical thinking or another. His arguments are sharp and in som cases caustic, but they all follow this observation.
“Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.”
If we take Hume at his word, I’m sure that he would approve of our investigating bias in his work if we acknowledged that our experience and reasoning concerning matters fact are not infallible and may lead us into errors.
6
This article obscured the fact that there is a LONG tradition of criticizing the “canonical” philosophical ideas that came out of the Enlightenment from within the tradition of Western Philosophy itself, running from Marx through Adorno, through De Beauvoir and Fanon and Arendt, through Foucault and Delueze, through Agamben, etc. Foucault’s first major work, for example, was a translation of and highly critical introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, in which Kant made many of the anti-Semitic views mentioned here as well as some jarringly racist ones. But in doing so, Foucault showed how those views basically provided the foundations for 200 years of European “racial science” and why that was bad.
So, crucially, these thinkers didn’t say “don’t read Kant, don’t read Hegel, don’t read Heidegger, because they’re wrong.” That’s too easy; it won’t actually address the problematic systemic consequences of those philosophers’ work. They say instead: “DEFINATELY read all those people, BECAUSE they’re wrong, and try to understand WHY they’re wrong and HOW their wrongheaded ideas have shaped the contemporary world. We can’t achieve a more just society by reforming our existing social structures if we don’t understand their origins and the reasons for why those social structures are the way they are. And we can’t do that without taking seriously, with a critical and attentive eye, the history of Western philosophical thought that provided the foundations for those social structures.”
24
'... there is a LONG tradition of criticizing the “canonical” philosophical ideas ...'
Karl Popper wrote two volumes critiquing various political philosophers, starting with Plato. See:
"The Open Society and Its Enemies"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies
2
Thank you for this comment.
Start with the premise that all humans are flawed. Otherwise,
if we only study the thoughts of perfect individuals, there is very little to read.
13
I've heard, Benjamin Netanyahu declare himself
"a Kantian." He is reported to read Kant for recreation.
Henry Kissinger's senior honors thesis at Harvard, all 300 plus
pages of it, entitled The Meaning of History, drew heavily on Kant.
It sounds like Ms. Shrage is trying to manufacture some "conventional wisdom." Let's hope her students have multiple sources of wisdom...conventual and actual.
www.wednesdayswars.com
5
I never quite understood what a "Philosopher" or a "Thinker" were or are . Should those so anointed be forgiven for nasty views , regardless of the passage
of time ?
The sensitivity to faulty historical persona is so challenging . Should one boycott Wagner music because he was a virulent anti-Semite ? . Or what should one make of a slave-owning esteemed President of the USA and Founder of a nation ? or of a brutal Imperial king like Philip II of Spain , the cruel colonizer of South America ? .
My answer is simple : Speak the historical truth - Condemn them all !
4
As we go about our daily activities, we all think and develop a personal philosophy, be it crude or refined, expressed or internalized- I’ve always thought that those who are formally labeled as Thinkers/Philosophers are those who, unlike the most of us, contribute in no other way to our society.
1
@Truthbetoldalways, Just recognize
that humans are flawed. All,
including Jews, have biases.
Focus on the great ideas these
philisophers have propunded
and advanced our thinking and
values.
"... anti-Semitism...a product of ignorance and fear, or fanatical beliefs, or some other irrational force. But...some... accomplished thinkers...defended anti-Semitic views...including Hume, Voltaire and Kant."
Thus some accomplished thinkers were anti-Semitic, ignorant, frightened, fanatical and irrational.
Anti-Semitism/Judeophobia began with the Babylonian Exile of Jews from Judah (586 BC)--the first Jewish Diaspora--a form of god-story nationalism--persistent in Trump and Trumpies.
The Old Testament is guilty too--corrupting some Judeo/Christians embracing the Ten Commandments --the first ten of Mosaic Law.
Commandments/Laws 1-4 prohibit freedom of religion.
1. ...no other gods before thee.
2. ...no worship of graven images.
3. ...no God's name in vain
4. ...keep holy the sabbath
These are the constitution of a religious state--religion rule--marketed as theocracy--god-rule. A state religion (Church of England) switches the order.
Both religious states and state religions are more or less forms of political monolatry (not to be confused with monotheism/one god)--only one religion will be allowed. Variations span exclusivity (like monogamy) to special status--the others discriminated against.
The Enlightenment was the dawn of secularism. Equal freedom of religion means no discrimination for or against any. That's polylatry--an uneasy peace, since each claims superiority. Thus secular limits--none are above the law.
Alatry prohibits of all religions.
5
@Michael Kubara The 10 commandments are intended for the followers of Judaism. And while Christians have adopted the list (slightly modified) into their various faiths, that was their choice. This list of commandments is not obligatory for pagans. You cannot therefore conclude that it "prohibit[s] freedom of religion".
@Brooklynite
It is not now US law; but was once Israeli law (still?). As mentioned the laws add up to monolatry. Monolatry prohibits of marginalizes all but the chosen religion.
US Christians (some) would have the 10 C's in the US constitution--thus prohibiting equal (at least) freedom of religion. And Trump obviously champions religious nationalism and monolatry.
'In “The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism,” the historian of philosophy Richard H. Popkin wrote: ...'
That's a paper. See: "The High Road to Pyrrhonism" by Richard H. Popkin (Hackett Publishing, 1993).
Thanks to Veronica (Brooklyn) for noting its obscurity in an earlier reply.
3
If we take the basic tenet of Judaism to be that Jews are members of a tribe and that this tribe and this tribe alone has a covenant with the one and only God, creator of all that is and will be, and that because of this covenant they will be saved to the exclusion of (virtually) all others, then it shouldn't come as a surprise that non-Jewish philosophers are critical...
12
@Rudy Flameng
You are absolutely mistaken that Judaism states that only Jews will be saved. Firstly, there is no original sin from which to be saved---that is a Christian idea. The redemption named in the Torah is the return of the people to their homeland, period. We say " The righteous of all faiths have a place in the world to come".
10
@Rudy Flameng Every baseball team thinks that they are a special team. Then they compete, some lose, some win and some get their feelings hurt. Religion is similar in some ways. You have to believe to be religious, that's a problem.
1
@Rudy Flameng Are you seriously using Judaism as a justification for Anti Semitism? And which religion says that everyone who doesn't accept the one true lord are all condemned to burn in hell for all eternity? Why aren't these erudite non-Jewish philosophers critical of Christianity?
2
So much discussion about Jews. Does anyone realize there are only fourteen million Jews in the entire world. Half of them live in Israel. Most of the others live in the United States, mainly in New York and Los Angeles. People who've never a Jew in their life hate them. The Churches preached that the Jews killed Jesus. They created this hatred. Now, again, violence against Jews is ascending. Humanity has drifted down to a new low. I fear what will happen in the next twenty years.
14
@Alexis Powers So...what else is new?
@Alexis PowersBeing Jewish , it's always been hard for me to understand what all the hubbub is about. We have bbqs in our backyards and watch tv like everyone else.Not sure why anybody would be excited about somebody else being Jewish.
3
The idea that Hume held a polygenetic view of humanity is unfounded. And had the author (or Richard H. Popkin) bothered to read "The Natural History of Religion" they would see that the major contrast he draws is between polytheism and monotheism. Monotheism is better than polytheism because it approximates the physical unity of the world, but Hume doesn't exactly give glowing reviews to monotheism in any of its forms.
5
I think it is important to distinguish between Jews as an ethnic group and Judaism as a religion. As an ethnic group, Jews have made monumental contributions to our culture of arts, sciences, medicine, and equal rights, perhaps more so than any other ethnic group. When considered as a religion, all religions deserve criticism. Science and rationality should always trump religion, as evidenced by everyday news. I am neither Jewish, nor religious as far as I know. I don’t believe in supernatural magic.
13
@JSK Have you considered that science is your religion?
1
An interesting assignment would be to ask whether Kant's antisemitic beliefs could be contradicted using his own philosophical principles.
8
Yes it is disgusting that Voltaire and Kant did not read Said or Foucault. Shame on them.
10
@GRW
Ha! Great comment. Although I am afraid the purifying hordes have turned on Foucault too. His late turn to virtue ethics as a way out of the suffocating legalism of the politics of his day (and ours) ruffled the feathers of his American adherents once they realized his program was at directly odds with theirs. They prefer their Foucault with the joy and the Nietzsche taken out--so Said is a natural choice.
1
I guess Jews can join eastern cultures, mid eastern cultures, and African cultures in being left out of the traditional western narrative of the history of civilization.
6
"not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world.”
What a perfect description of how evangelicals are smitten with you-know-who.
2
Antisemitism has always had an intellectual respectabltly and it probably won't change any time soon. That said, it's probably better to read these people critically than to ignore them. Ignoring them won't make it go away.
4
In my view the greatest influence to Anti-Semitism is the Bible, more often referred to as the New Testament. In church's around the world, the Jewish Bible, the Tanaka, or the Masoretic Text is always referred to as the "Old Testament." Christians are told without compunction that Judaism and the Bible of the Jews has been replaced with the "Good News". In fact there is in print a "Good News Bible".
The claim of Good News and assertion of the title "New Testament' immediately suggests that religion of the Jews is no longer valid and has been replaced. That goes hand in glove with the Nazi slogan "The Jews will not replace us".
The Christian Bible also promotes universal guilt of all the Jews both past and present for the crime of killing Jesus. The conundrum is that without the death of Jesus there is no resurrection and no Christianity.
Christian philosophers, teachers and members of the clergy openly deny Jews the right of the legitimacy of the Jewish faith by referring to the Jewish bible as the Old Testament. That also denies the 5000 year plus history, tradition and values of the Jewish people. Evangelicals who proselytize to Jews begin their conversion message by telling Jews that the prophecies of the Old Testament have come true and the Old Testament has been replaced. When a Jew refuses to listen they tell them that "God has hardened their heart".
To end anti-Semitism stop calling the Jewish bible the Old Testament. Stop proselytizing to the Jews.
10
@Jay
What if you prefer older to newer, including in sacred texts, as well as in wines, and in friends, too. Then what?
“Should we continue to [read opinion pieces written by philosophers like Shrage] without mention of the harmful prejudices they [may help] legitimize” by focusing exclusively on the anti-Semitism of Enlightenment thinkers while failing to even mention the massive textual evidence of their gobsmacking racism directed at people of color? Just askin’...
12
I do not see that this essay gives any grounds for calling Hume an anti-semite. He did not believe that humankind descended from one couple: Adam and Eve. Hence Hume was polygenic. And he believed that European philosophy was more indebted to Greece than to the Judeo-Christian tradition. That hardly makes him a hater of Jews.
17
For many, the image of a racist is a less educated, isolated, poor, damaged, irrational individual. The reality of racism is much different. Anyone can be a racist, even celebrities, successful business-persons, politicians or rational, world-famous philosophers. Anti-Semitic hatred has been around for thousands of years, so prevalent and has so much acceptance at various levels, it is hard to end. Six million, MILLION Jews were murdered in the holocaust, acts the United States refused to interrupt. My great uncle was murdered in a government-encouraged pogrom killing thousands of Russian Jews. Jews were murdered during the black plague, accused by the Church of being its cause. The Inquisition was a government/Church led genocide of Spanish Jews. The first ghettos were created to keep Jews separate. Since Jews, as a group, have been successful in the constant face of racism, for many, anti-Semitic hatred jut doesn't seem as bad as the racism other groups face. Since Jews are very small group, they are easy for the powerful to attack and not worry about repercussions. Even philosophers found anti-Semitism rational.
18
Laurie:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, as poignantly as you have.
Antisemitism, unfortunately is here to stay.
4
religions for the most part discriminate philosophically with non-adherents. christians via their philosophy see it right that non-believers suffer. jews see themselves as chosen over others who have in their teachings been exterminated.
the anti-semitic musings of these philosophers are similar, just less holy.
1
@bill zorn The idea of chosenness has been grossly distorted. It is not about superiority but about responsibility...the responsibility to carry the word of the Torah out into the world and through time.
2
Did Laurie deliberately exclude the “anti-Semitic” rants of Karl Marx?
2
Voltaire rightly was absolutely appalled by all sorts of barbarous "ethics" (e.g., stoning adulterous women to death, approving slavery, etc.) and acts (e.g., the genocidal, grotesquely triumphalist slaughter of the Canaanites in Joshua when the Jews horribly stole their "Promised Land" in the first place) in the Hebrew Bible. Above all, he was disgusted with both the narrowness of puritanical Jewish moralism, not to mention the to him rationally absurd superstitions of the Jews (e.g., the to him crazy idea that God had "chosen" them for some form of unique specialness, not to mention the equally counter-factual fantasy that God was "providential" and rewarded the good, punished the evil, and would make things turn out for the "best" some day. To Voltaire Deism was the only creed supported by reason. Lacking our own understanding of the way sheer, meaningless chance rules both sub-atomic particles and the stars, Voltaire can hardly be blamed for still adhering to the now irrational beiief that there is an "order" to nature that proves it was "created" by a supremely intelligent divine mind. At any rate, for Voltaire, Jews were to blame for introducing the absurd, irrational superstitions into the West which had created so much havoc in history after they were extended and made even more bizarre and murderous by the Christians. It's wrong to think of Voltaire as a vulgar anti-Semite. The Jews for him were simply part of the "infamous" religious lunacy he fought all his life.
17
@Fred White the claim that Jews were the only people with "superstitious beliefs" and faulted with "infecting" European thought is simply outrageous. It sounds to me like the only Voltaire you've read is what was printed in this article.
3
I appreciate that the Times regularly presents examinations of the philosophical underpinnings of modern thought.
Though inevitable, historical revisionism is still a perilous undertaking. Most of the great ideas and social constructs were produced by (mostly) men who, though gifted with prodigious intellect and broad vision, were still people of their time, and not exempt from the collective prejudices of their time. We have slave owners writing documents proclaiming freedom and equality – demonstrating that they were wiser than they knew. I would guess that many, or most of us who are not a part of academia, are more imbued with the largest ideas of philosophers, and not the minutiae of their prejudices. It is inarguably useful to have these overt and subtle prejudices pointed out, and to allow us an opportunity to examine the way they have influenced our thinking. It is also, I think, counterproductive, to cast their entire oeuvre as a product of poisoned thinking.
The idea that there is objective truth to be found, either in philosophy, or any other endeavor, is a fruitless quest that leads to the devaluing of the evolving reality that comprises our world view. If Voltaire, Hume, et. al, cease to be icons of enlightened thinking and are recast as purveyors of anti-Semitism, are we not all diminished? When we think of Thomas Jefferson, do we think of "All men are created equal," or think of a slave holder and sexual abuser. While both may be true, which serves us better?
10
@michaeltide I don't think this article is arguing that we should simply focus on the anti-semitism of these philosophers rather than their "larger" ideas. Rather, to take the good with the bad. Continue to teach the ideas of Kant et al, but with historical context as well.
3
@Todd Levi, if it were an argument for historical context I would agree, but it seems to be an argument for an epistemological deconstruction of their individual characters.
1
I don't accept or reject cosmologies or cosmogines based on such contingent factors as ethnological prejudices. I don't consider an appreciation of Wagner's music to be related in any way to his personal political expressions.
I still find useful insights in the works of Hegel, Kant, et. al., but I'm considering the perpetuation of their ideas when the impact of quantum physics is more fully expressed in philosophy. The hoary double-slit experiment seems to suggest that the causal role of human perception in determining the results of experiments signals the abandonment of materialism as a potentially useful ideology. In the future, I think, philosophers will have to be competent mathematicians, as well.
1
I dismissed Plato's Republic when I realized his utopian society took slave labor for granted. It is the foundation of his society and integral to his assertions. Thus, it renders the whole document moot. However, many great thinkers were flawed in ways that did not touch their greatest ideas. It would be madness to dismiss the core knowledge of our forefathers because their politics are obsolete. If the ideas are true and useful, why must they be tossed out because we no longer revere the source?
3
@Michael Sapko I am utterly sad to hear this, for there are indeed no slaves in the "Politeia" (Greek for "way of ruling", which is actually the original title of the book you mentioned) Plato himself proposed. Not one passage, not one line throughout the whole book. Slaves, according to him, come into the picture firstly in a Timocracy, which is for him a corrupted way of ruling. Maybe it's time to go back to the book. Here's a brilliant translation: https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Focus-Philosophical-Library-Plato/dp/158510261X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=joe+sachs+republic&qid=1552931684&s=gateway&sr=8-1
2
Should philosophy be taught as a history of itself or as a history of ideas in historical context?
The anti-Jewish attitudes of philosophers living in a culture that was suffused with Anti-semitism is not surprising. The great philosophers made contributions of continuing interest and that is why those ideas are taught. The fact that these thinkers also shared in the ignorance and prejudices of their time is worth noting, but as part of the more important point that philosophy is not a separate endeavor, it is part of human history.
20
Heidegger is mentioned almost as an afterthought in this piece. Just another guy in parentheses. But he taught Nazi philosophy at university in Germany while wearing an SS uniform! That has to be the quintessential example.
7
@Benjo
This is factually incorrect. Heidegger did not teach "Nazi philosophy," whatever that is. As rector of Freiburg, he did carry out the Nazi state policy to fire the Jewish professoriate, and a few of his writings (recently translated and published as the "Black Books") do contact Semitic material. He was not an SS member either.
This deserves to be confronted squarely, but your information is grossly inaccurate.
9
Anti-semitism has been embedded in the fabric of this country, like some racial attitudes, since the founding of this country. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/americas-long-history-anti-semitism/574234/ ("Trump Needs to Demilitarize His Rhetoric," 2018).
Anti-semitism is not the product of a single leader, but Trump facilitates the hatred by his general views of personal opposition and combat. I do not think he reads much of Western European philosophers and their writings that date back to the 18th century and beyond: https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-the-longest-hatred ("Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred").
I am not arguing about select prejudices held by or influences of prominent European philosophers. They were justifying hatreds and fears long embedded.
1
Efforts to sequester philosophical traditions to adhere to the "truth" is ridiculous.
7
I was raised with Kant and Hume, Spinoza and Martin Buber. I had a friend who went to Princeton and would sit in on Walter Kaufman lectures when I visited him. Unlike the author of this screed, I realize that cultural prejudices are carried forth in the literature of any given era. Kant, Hume, et al were not advocating or promoting anti-Semitism, so the intellectual fascists should lighten up and stop subjecting philosophy to their contemporary identity politics.
18
Spot on! Western Canon curricula routinely eliminate all Jewish thinkers from the march of Western Civilization. Starting with the Greeks and Romans and moving through the medieval period, Renaissance and Enlightenment, these curricula are so devoid of Jews that the Bible, which is critical to Western thought, is hardly mentioned. The role of Jewish and Moslem thinkers in the Scholastic Movement is never mentioned. Carroll's book, "Constantine's Sword" begins to address this huge gap. I urge any student in a Western Canon curriculum to read it as an antidote to the exclusions which the curriculum maintains.
9
@Mark L. Zeidel, M.D.
Spinoza is squarely in the canon. Maimon is not, but Kant famously acknowledged him as the only one of his critics who had actually understood him, and he has had a renewed interest in the past decades.
3
@Mark L. Zeidel, M.D.
Why do you think that the Bible is "critical" to Western thought? All widely practiced religions are quite similar: they all have religion that becomes the unofficial "state religion," and include a moral code that is fundamentally a variation on the same pieties. Most scholars agree that the Bible was written centuries after the events it purports to describe, and has multiple authors.
1
This is a religious tract. There’s no discrimination against people here. She’s actually taking the position that anyone who denigrates the wonderful contributions of the Old Testament Bible is a demonstrated anti-Semite. That’s trivializing the real issues of anti-Semitism.
I have to say I’m not terribly worried whether Jews are given enough credit for giving rise to Christianity. Good to be off the hook for the religious right!
9
Popkin “ saw [Christianity] more as emerging from pagan polytheism than from Judaism. Hw was right on that one. Jew rejected Paul's Christ, the son of God, and pagan Romans saw this belief as a modern and interesting substitute to ancient sons of gods and to Emperors declaring themselves gods.
2
@Roland Berger Julian the Apostate would disagree. But, regardless, I actually think Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity in Daybreak is more insightful: it’s not that Christianity is “paganistic”, it’s that it had such a lust for expansion and power that it more or less “vacuumed” up all all other belief systems and spat them out as an unrefined whole barely held together - and then, no surprise, saw them (because it wanted to see them) reflected in every other religion. That’s one reason why, contrary to popular belief due to Nazi revisionist propaganda, Nietzsche admired the Jews: not only were their beliefs consistent, refined, exceptional, unlike Christianity, but their devotion to them throughout a history of oppression had given them a source of strength and resolve that Christians could never know, didn’t want to know.
For sure, We should reject Einstein's Relativities because he supported Zionism. And deny Newton because he was in to alchemy. And just stop eating because the creator of artificial fertilizer (Haber) also invented nerve gas...
What's therefore lacking in this article is a historical perspective that's ostensibly the story of philosophy itself. So even as they expanded the boundaries of European thought, philosophers were conceptually trapped in the unstated values of their own society. Or rather, has our author failed to read Goldhagen's 'Hitler's willing Executioners"? In the 18th century, Christianity itself was understood as anti-semitic.
Philosophy has always been confined to socio-cultural Frames of Reference that direct what facts must necessarily fall within ('Sorry, Wittgenstein!). In this sense, it's always been relevant to inquire as to whether any 'outsider' is capable of understanding what we're doing.
Take, for example, the current lingua franca called "middlebrow american"-- whose working assumptions are
far more amenable to ranoidism than Kant. Would academia be willing to bend their rules of discourse to include 'objectivism'?
So yes, we now consider it absurd to claim that Jews cannot understand philosophy. Ours is now an all-inclusive tent that extends cultural norms to everyone because 'everyone' is capable of understand what we're doing. This is called 'progress': the real story that our author fails to mention.
8
German universities in the 1930’s were the center of Europe’s intellectual elite. Few Jews were hired as faculty. That’s oft been true in academia. Even in the U.S. Given the prominence of Jews in securing Nobel Prizes relative to their modest numbers might not the inference be that the elites are as prejudicied as the less educated. Or is the real problem here that the intellectual and cultural foundations of modern western civilization just do not welcome the Jewish contribution ? That much of Europe, especially France, has become violently anti-Semitic, post the Holocaust could suggest the problem is ingrained cultural intensive dislike of Jews. At all levels.
4
At what point in this historical narrative were Arabs no longer a Semitic people so that anti-Semitism became only a prejudice against people of the Jewish religion?
Voltaire, Kant and Hume developed philosophies that later thinkers found flawed. Why were they then—and now—allowed to shape who is to be Semitic and rail against them?
It seems as if the Philosophers of the Stone have some more research to do. If Biblical tracts can be part of philology, then Abraham—revered both by Islam and Judaism—has a linage that needs to be explained.
2
@Peter P. Bernard
The answer, of course, is that Arabs have never ceased being Semites. And more needs to be done to remind the world of this fact.
2
@Rob. Aren’t Arabs Semitic people as well?
@Peter P. Bernard
First, the notion of Semitic peoples is a dubious one, except perhaps as a kind of short hand for people who speak Semitic languages.
More importantly, the term 'antisemitism' does not refer to general hostility to Semitic people (or speakers of Semitic languages). The term 'antisemitism' was coined in the late 19th C to indicate racial, as opposed to religious, hostility strictly to Jews--not to Arabs, Ethiopians, or other speakers of Semitic languages. (In fact, not all Jews speak a Semitic language.)
The OED gives the following definition of "antisemitism": "Hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people; (also) the theory, action, or practice resulting from this."
1
Professor Shrage confirms that anti-Semitic behavior was as alive and well among intellectuals of the 18th Century as it was during the 200 continuous centuries prior to the births of Hume, Voltaire and Kant...before reaching it's crescendo of malevolence during the 20th Century's Holocaust.
I'll wager a bet, that the vandals who desecrate Jewish cemeteries in the 21st aren't adherents of the philosophies of Hume, Voltaire or Kant. I'd hardly believe that when Hitler's staff were discussing the mechanics of the Final Solution, the creation of efficient transportation modes to carry the Jews of Europe to death camps in western Poland, that they were also bantering about transcendental idealism. And, when a man wearing a yarmulke (or kippah) is being beaten on streets of Brooklyn or Paris, I'd doubt his assailants are inspired readers of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, or naturalism.
We should denounce antisemitism from whatever quarter it emanates from...be it lowbrow or highbrow.
16
The author says "A better question is: Should those who teach their works and ideas in the 21st century share them without mentioning the harmful stereotypes these thinkers helped to legitimize?"
What purpose would be served by this, other than to further the agenda of those who would censor history? The works of these thinkers should stand on their own merits, and their personal prejudices and idiosyncrasies have no more bearing on their ideas than, for example, what their personal sexual fetishes might have been. Wagner was an anti-semite, but his music should be judged on its own merits. Mark Twain used the n-word repeatedly in his works to make a point, not because he was a racist (which he certainly was not), but there are people who would keep his books away from children to prevent offense. Where would this nonsense stop?
No, it's not a "better question"; it's an irrelevant one.
6
Look guys, early philosophers or cobblers absorb cultural prejudices.
Today, after Boas and other scientists we should all know better.
“Race” must always be in quotes.
Melanin and genes were unknown to yesterday’s philosophers.
Cp
2
In making Kant -someone who has devoted a life time establishing a secular philosophy- a supporter of Christianity, the author has succeeded in accomplishing something that no philosopher yet has in the history of philosophy: ti eks oudenos (Greek for “something from nothing”).
7
What I don't understand is how other college courses are altered so as not to offend different minority groups, but Jews aren't worthy of the same consideration.
5
If we're going to ban every book that painted a negative picture of Jews you might just as well write off the entire Western canon. Where do you go next? Books that paint a negative view of Englishmen. Negative views of Muslims? Americans? Perish the thought. Catholicism as a system of religious belief goes of course. I read philosophy and history and struggling through Kant and Hume didn't turn me into an anti Semite although it did occasionally turn me into an anti Kantian.
3
Ever think philosopher's aren't as smart as academics say. Not only were some of them anti Semitic some were perverts. Can I use such a judgmental word? I'm not saying they aren't worth reading (I never have) but they weren't perfect. How could they meet the perfection and purity of the reader? When the reader himself is a hypocrite?
Why does the reader demand the such purity? Why do they have such high standards for others? Why do they want to destroy anything not like themselves? I'll bet the great ones already discussed this and they came up at least partially right.
2
Non-Christian religions don't have to be anti-Semitic because Jews don't matter to them. Christianity, however is dependent upon archaic forms of Judaism. For example: most Jews won't give a moment's thought to such ancient concepts of sin, forgiveness and redemption, having replaced them by ethics and responsibility for one's actions, yet Christians are deeply mired in them.
This situation is bound to cause endless resentment towards and hostility against Jews.
1
It seems that we have found, at last, the measure by which all art and culture, all human endeavour, all public discourse, all government policy should be assessed: is it anti-Semitic or does it suggest any anti-Semitic “tropes.”
3
How patently silly and shamefully revisionist.
Pretty much everyone alive during the enlightenment period held those views - including - I don't know - the Pope.
Guess what - they also denigrated people of color and women - I k now - right - shocking and an eye-opener - right?
Here is the assumption I hold going into reading theEMP philosophers: they're racist sexist and homophobic - but it doesn't affect their writings on induction, morality or metaphysics.
Now - Heidegger - that one is a problem for me but if he is a problem - then how do I read Arendt?
6
Jewish law requires and presumes an individual relationship with God. Each person interpreting the law for themselves. Christian approaches require a community authority to do the interpreting for them. Judaism requires you to be your own judge, prosecutor, defender and jury. In Christianity, you are the accused, presumed guilty by the virtue of a sinful nature, and praying for absolution.
Christianity is the result of trying to open up monotheistic worship to those who who eschewed the demands of Abraham's covenant. This is evident in the New Testament which is incomprehensible without the Jewish Bible as its core resource. Christianity demands the acceptance of Jesus as the only way to please God. Jewish thought sees God as loving all people regardless of their beliefs. The need for original sin and the rejection of Jesus as divine is the core of antisemitism from Christian theologian/philosophers. Jews are, by definition, damnable. What should we expect from people who follow such views?
3
@Zinkler really well said.
2
Upon reading Kant, Hegel and even Marx, I found that each laid out their philosophical ideas clearly, but then turned to their schemes and wrote "what about the Jews" since according to each of them, we stood outside of history. These philosophers wrote about a final solution to the Jewish question, and well, everyone knows the result of that stance. Does this hatred of my people invalidate all philosophy and what tragedies it has led to? A good question, but can't the same crime be laid at the feet of Shakespeare, Dickens and other great writers? Well, all I can say is that this time, we Jews have nukes.
4
I'll grant your point, however, we also need to address the "Anti-Gentilism" embodied in many Jewish books, such as some Yiddish children's books which blatantly admonishes the children not to even look at a Gentile, calling them despicable words like stupid and unclean.
We also should examine how being a called a "chosen" people feel to the supposedly "UN-chosen" ones? I'm actually Jewish but what if I were Palestinian effectively imprisoned in the open-air Gaza strip presumably just for being non-Jew.
I'm just saying let's be honest and look at all harmful prejudices.
6
Frankly, this critique loses credibility for this reader because no where is the name of the Jew Baruch Spinoza--or the profound influence of his work on great thinkers since his time--mentioned. How could Spinoza have been forgotten here? Was this just an oversight? Moreover, whether or not a philosopher was--or is--an anti-Semite, or prejudiced in other ways, is irrelevant to whether that philosopher's work increases the sum of human understanding. The work should be judged on its merits alone--not based on anything biographical about its author.
2
"and presented practically no historical connection between Judaism and Christianity (which he saw more as emerging from pagan polytheism).”
Maybe I am reading this in reversed but, Christian theology is derivative of European paganism more so than eastern monotheism. The Judeo-Christian religion thing is a modern invention to support pro Israel, anti-antisemitism propaganda.
I do think this column is a bold statement and do appreciate it. Myself having been indoctrinated in ethics philosophy have concluded that ethics philosophy is really just tribal self justification and generally supports to tribes inherent moral stature while denigrating the other as immoral or misguided at best.
IMO, The current debate is generational tribalism where the older generation, post WW2, became pro-Israel and anti-middle eastern (muslim) therefore the current generation become anti-Israel and pro-middle eastern to set itself apart and as morally superior.
4
@Mike
That's absurd.
First of all, most of the Jewish Bible is and has always been an integral part of what Christianity called its "Sacred Scripture", remember?
And Christianity is first of all a monotheism. The only other monotheism, until Islam was born, is Judaism. And Jesus himself was a Jew, and merely wanted to reform the version of Judaism that was predominant in his time, certainly not creating a new religion.
Finally, when Christian philosophy and theology took off, in the 13th century, they basically took over the work of Muslim and Arab philosophers and theologians of the centuries before. And what those oriental philosophers did was creating a synthesis between oriental monotheism and Neoplatonism, itself an oriental synthesis between Plato and Aristotle. And Plato and Aristotle themselves were much more connected to the Middle East and its many sages than to what today is called Europe (= northern Europe) ..
1
@Mike ״The Judeo-Christian religion thing is a modern invention to support pro Israel, anti-antisemitism propaganda.” Not at all so! Not only was Jesus Jewish, but much of his preaching was either inspired by the Torah and Prophets (what the Christians call the “Old Testament”), or was in reaction to rabbinic Judaism. So much of the “proof” of Jesus’ stature as a messiah is based on verses from the Hebrew prophets! So much Western literature refers to Bible stories from the Hebrew bible! I have no idea where you got the idea from, but if anything, for centuries Christians did not want to admit their close affiliation with Judaism and Jewish texts, and much more recently have Christians (aside from pro-Israel evangelicals) embraced the common history. Christian theology students who have attended my Passover seder found it very meaningful and helpful in understanding their own Christianity. It is the decline of anti-semitism in the Christian world that has allowed Christians to find their connection to Judaism, and not at all an artificial connection designed to combat anti-semitism.
2
@Mike @Mike “The Judeo-Christian religion thing is a modern invention to support pro Israel, anti-antisemitism propaganda.” Not at all so! Not only was Jesus Jewish, but much of his preaching was either inspired by the Torah and Prophets (what the Christians call the “Old Testament”), or was in reaction to rabbinic Judaism. So much of the “proof” of Jesus’ stature as a messiah is based on verses from the Hebrew prophets! So much Western literature refers to Bible stories from the Hebrew bible! I have no idea where you got the idea from, but if anything, for centuries Christians did not want to admit their close affiliation with Judaism and Jewish texts, and much more recently have Christians (aside from pro-Israel evangelicals) embraced the common history. Christian theology students who have attended my Passover seder found it very meaningful and helpful in understanding their own Christianity. It is the decline of anti-semitism in the Christian world that has allowed Christians to find their connection to Judaism, and not at all an artificial connection designed to combat anti-semitism.
1
I am a lawyer and running for District Attorney in my county. I am advocating for the sound, secular education of Hasidic children, because without a liberal education, a panoply of problems ensue, including poverty. Is this "anti-Semitic"? I am criticizing a Jewish religious group's (the Satmar's) non-compliance with the NYS Education Law, yet Hasidic spokesmen view this as an attack on their religion.
When people criticize the conduct of some members of the Hasidic community (e.g., disproportionate poverty and accompanying use of welfare benefits), they are often accused of being anti-Semitic. This makes valid criticism difficult, especially by NYS politicians who need the Hasidic "block vote."
A religious group's insularity can lead to misunderstandings and fears about their perceived conduct (with or without factual basis). As an outsider, it is difficult for me to know the inner workings of the Hasidic communities of Brooklyn, Kiryas Joel, and my county, Rockland.
My point is that when conduct is involved, it is not always be easy to distinguish between unfair bias (anti-semitism, racial bias, sexism, etc.) and valid criticism.
12
@Mike Diederich Jr
What is anti-Semitic is to falsely characterize an entire group of people, based on their religion.
That Jews would propose a "material" or literal exegesis of the Ancient Testament is an idea that Christian scholars have invented and then spread for almost 2,000 years now, and it has been proven to be false.
So that Jews would be more interested in material values and less interested in spiritual values than Christians, is false too.
It's false in the sense that all available historical sources about their philosophies and theologies prove that it's false, and it's equally false when by "Jews" here you're referring to individuals belonging to this culture/religion.
Criticizing a specific political decision made by a specific religious leader isn't racism, and entirely okay. Of course, those religious leaders may disagree with your arguments, and interpret "freedom of religion" as a political value in a different way than you do. They may for instance support the political decision to stay poor, by using arguments that have to do with religious choice. Although we can reject those choices for ourselves, political freedom of religion does mean allowing them to choose differently, imho - as long as they respect US laws about education, of course.
This simply means that your cause (getting their kids a good education) is part of a debate among citizens, rather than something that you can impose by law.
1
In the end, Kant, Voltaire and the others were just people with important ideas. They were not heroes. That they were flawed goes without saying, but that does not justify their flaws. Recognize their antisemitism and move on. Let's proactively include the other great worldly thinkers without respect to their origins, race, sex, or religion and include them in the modern curriculum for the important contributions that they undoubtedly made. Call out to Hypatia of Alexandria.
1
"After World War II, when European Jews were reimagined as European, and therefore of the West, social barriers to Jews broke down in most areas of American life"
The very phrase "Judeo-Christian" originated with Orwell just before the War, in his reaction to German antisemitism, and it did not become current until after WW2. Before that, they were not linked in that way.
https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2017/10/04/what-judeo-christian-tradition/
"The term became prevalent towards the middle of the 20th century in the United States"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian
We would have nothing left of our past if we rejected everything from everyone who thought differently than we do now about a currently held value.
That isn't to say they were correct, just that the nature of things is to grow and change, and in the process we don't throw out study of what we grew from.
5
@Mark Thomason
As your own link shows, that's only the case when referred to ethics.
Nietzsche already used the same notion more than a century before Orwell did, as did others. Each time, it referred to what Judaism and Christianity have in common (a lot, obviously).
3
Shrage quoting Popkin: "... Hume apparently accepted a polygenetic view of man’s origin ..."
That Popkin quote is so hedged that it is useless for supporting the smear on Hume. And Hume never uses the word "polygenetic". If Shrage wants to criticize Hume, she should quote Hume himself.
Shrage: "In the United States before the 20th century, universities primarily hired Christian theologians to teach philosophy."
That's unsourced. And true or not, that is irrelevant to how philosophy should be taught now. Shrage is committing the genetic fallacy.
BTW, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey were not theologians.
8
@WCF And that Popkin book? I searched for it on WorldCat and found only one copy available in libraries worldwide.
3
@Veronica: And that Popkin book?
That's a paper. See: "The High Road to Pyrrhonism" by Richard H. Popkin (Hackett Publishing, 1993).
1
I always thought of the enlightenment philosophers as equal opportunity nonbelievers in religion.
3
@Perfectly normal
Most of them actively support religion. What they introduced as new and at the time revolutionary idea in the West, was separation between state and church, and ending the power of the church to block the publications of writings that they disagreed with.
3
And also; there is an old and rather thin book by a French philosopher on the subject of antisemitism that I recommend thoroughly.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew.
It is strangely illuminating also other phenomena, like populism.
3
How can we subject Kant or Voltaire time to the tolerance metrics of 21st century academia. At that time, Jews lived in ghettos and were limited by law from being in broader society, so doubtful that these philosopher knew Jews well. So antisemitism comes from same place it comes from today, lack of knowledge and old tropes/stereotypes. The real question is whether these thinkers have something to teach us today, I believe they do, and their antisemitic thoughts (I would assume racist too) can be part of the discussion.
I don't understand the need to expunge divergent thought from our academic settings. Do we remove the integrated circuits from all our electronic devices because Shockley expressed belief in eugenics? Anti-semitism is not what's important about these philosophers; at best its a side note that's interesting and may provide nuance to some of their writings.
2
Hang on. Hume "apparently" accepted a "polygenetic view of man's origin" and did not emphasize a link between Judaism and Christianity, and therefore he's a "polygenetic racist"? Maybe there's more to it than that, but on its face this just sounds like Hume is a secularist. The fact that his thoughts and what he emphasizes are different than the writer's doesn't make him a racist. Voltaire is in a different boat, but you start with Hume and include a photo of his major work, and then say nothing of substance to back the argument up?
10
If I synthesize what I've been taught, western civilization is a blend of Christianity that grew out of Judaism, and of Greco/Roman culture, with a smattering of things from outside those cultures. For example, algebra, the concept of zero, and much of our astronony came from the Arabic world. Also, there has been a constant influence of things Eastern, including Chinese ceramics, Japanese art, and Indian philosophy to name a few.
Is this inaccurate or racist?
While the philosophies of Hume, Voltaire, and Kant helped to get us where we are, we've moved on since then. For example, the idea that you shouldn't be racist is both Western, and recent. I don't see any evidence that this notion existed during the time of Hume, Voltaire, and Kant. Their racism is a sign of the times that they lived in; perhaps we should examine it and compare it with our beliefs today to gain insight into how we got here, and where to go next.
A few other tidbits I picked up from the article:
"...where the West is portrayed as the major agent of human advancement..."
Western civilization is the major agent of Western advancement.
"(Australia and America) tend to view our societies as extensions of European or Western or Christian civilization. "
Maybe "extension" is a bit strong, but they resemble Europe more than (for example) Japan, Indonesia, China, Columbia, Morocco, or Mozambique.
2
You say Jewish, Buddhist and Islamic philosophies should be incorporated into the teaching of Western philosophy. What about Hindu philosophy (the Upanishads, the six schools of Hindu philosophy including Vedanta), from which Buddhism developed?
1
Look, if your gonna study some guy's thoughts, then you're gonna be in his head, and that's pretty much all you're gonna find there. If he's brought up in a close minded world, then you're pretty much assured there's going to be locked doors to empty closets, and passageways that don't lead anywhere. And the places you do find stuff, a lot of it will be managed by the interior designers who influenced that guy's mind you're reading.
There is only so much time to study as one grows up, people can't study everything ever written or produced, so choices must be made no different than how one can't eat all the types of food the world offers and learn to cook it in a lifetime much less by the age of college graduation. Therefore, biases will be made by virtue of what one can study by the choice to study this or that, again, not unlike how one eats and cooks.
But this op-ed confronts the fact that Jewish people and their cultural, moral and spiritual aspirations and histories are ignored or denigrated by western thinkers who helped craft the dominant hegemony of the time while living next door to Jews, and that Jews were carved out of hegemonic mass the western thinkers were sculpting. That is anti-Semitic.
So, yeah, it's fine to try and read a wider range of philosophy to get a better understanding of what the human mind can think to avoid the provincialism of the western thinkers' boorish views, but the real problem is that we need to stop overstating these guy's creaky minds.
2
in my many years of philosophy study, anything other than the assumption of equality was considered too ignorant for comment, as of course it should have been. wittgenstein was a jew and his family sort of modern medicis, supporting the arts in vienna. he wasn't exactly an outsider with foolish prejudices, just a commentator from within the culture. apart from that, if you were setting priorities for political discussion, where would this issue lie? and how much attention has it been given?
1
The absence of an "connection" in a peripheral work by Hume is an awfully slender reed on which to base a conclusion about his views on Jews, 250 years after the fact.
But even if Hume harbored anti-Semitic sentiments, they have nothing to do with his signifcant contributions to epistemology. Even Popkin, cited by Shrage, does "not think that...Hume’s racism...follows from his theory of knowledge." I fail to see how it is at all relevant to his place in philosophy, or is deserving of any more than a passing mention in a catalougue of similar biases held by almost all of his contemporaries.
What should be stressed, instead, is that Hume's philosophical approach, a skeptical empricism, has ultimately proven to be the antidote to racial and ethnic bias.
3
So-called truth seeking in any field is irretrievably political; all academic disciplines simply need to confront this reality and take it into account in their own endeavors. The writing of history belongs to the victors, as any conscientious historian well knows. Why should philosophy be any different? The Jewish philosophers of Europe were all silenced by Hitler, literally in most cases, and those who were left were too few to be heard over the continued focus on Christian authors.
One's views can of course create a bias in one's work. If one starts with the premise that Christianity is correct, it will be difficult for one to write fairly about anyone else. But if one can avoid such bias, why shouldn't anyone be able to write--to strict academic standards--about anyone else? Can African-American scholars write about non-minority historians or philosophers? Can non-minority scholars write about African-American historians or philosophers? Surely strict academic standards should allow this.
So many Jewish academics were murdered in the twentieth century. If we can't trust the academic world to make up for their missing voices as include Jewish philosophy in their work, what good is academia to any of us?
2
@Barbara8101, likewise, we should distinguish between theological and cultural (or secular if you prefer) philosophy. Is there a difference between "Jewish philosophers" and philosophers who happen to be Jewish, between "Christian philosophers," and philosophers who are Christians? Granted that there are aspect of their faith and culture that will help shape their ideas, but the lasting ideas tend to be transcendent and have more to do with their inherent universality than with the social caste of their authors.
"Popkin wrote that Voltaire challenged the biblical account of human history by asserting that only the Jews were descendants of Adam, and “everybody else pre-Adamites, though the non-European ones were degenerate or inferior to the European ones. Voltaire saw the Adamites as a major menace to European civilization, since they kept infecting it with what he considered the horrible immorality of the Bible. Voltaire therefore insisted that Europe should separate itself from the Adamites, and seek its roots and heritage and ideals in the best of the pre-Adamite world — for him, the Hellenic world.”
In his book on Tolerance, however, Voltaire analyses the Ancient Testament in detail and concludes that Jews clearly defended being tolerant as much as Christians did, and "tolerance" is one of the key concepts of Voltaire's entire philosophy.
So I'd like to see what arguments Popkin uses to back up his hypothesis that Voltaire had a racist, anti-Semitic worldview.
All too often, secondary literature tends to take quotes entirely out of context and then project contemporary meaning onto those sentences.
It it the case here too?
We do need to know more about this before we can call Voltaire a "polygenetic racist" ... !
3
@Ana Luisa
Very well put. Has Prof. Shrage even read Voltaire, Hume and Kant? She quotes only secondary sources in her argument.
Her animadversions against the mainstays of the enlightenment are outlandishly contradictory to the spirit of that era. Think of the "Lettres Persanes", contemporary with Voltaire. Their main point was to critique aspects of European culture by imagining the impressions that they would make on Persians. It was an effort to see through the eyes of the other. Same for Montaigne. Are we to abandon the giants of the enlightenment in favor of the two or three carping critics cited by Shrage?
That the NY Times presents us with a tertiary source like Shrage makes us wonder wether ahistorical PC anti-intellectualism is festering at the newspaper of record.
2
@Ana Luisa, you may also be aware that there was a sect of "Adamites" in post reformation Europe that advocated biblical poverty, even to the extent of going naked. They were considered, even by protestants to be a plague that needed to be wiped out, like Hugenots, etc.
1
As Lewis Black mimed "We walk among you". The invisibility of the Jewish contribution to world culture is shameful. The achievements of Jews have often been hidden or diminished to secure the prideful triumphalism of Christianity.We are not afraid of your achievements...why are you so afraid of ours?Although Christianity has a beautiful message, it needs to erase the fact that its foundation is all Jewish texts. We wrote those texts but many Christians believe that they were written by Jesus! Don't get me started. :-)
3
Philosophy isn't a science, it isn't useful to the ordinary person, it is in fact simply a repository of excuses for privilege for power possessing males of older times, sort of an "Old Testament" for bias.
Today, the study of knowledge and how we learn is, like Latin, a dead language, a playground for the overeducated and the under, well, philosophical. We learn the way dogs and elephants learn, and that will never change until robots take over.
So the fact that power possessing educated men in one culture were ignorant and biased against a different group, that they were anti-Jew, is irrelevant to life, but as such, were simply examples of all humans.
Should we continue to teach "thinkers" like Kant or Voltaire, over so many thinkers of today?
No.
Hugh
1
@Hugh Massengill, while I agree with your premises, your conclusion sounds like you're saying we should dispose of all knowledge that is not current. The internet has already threatened to make history subject to constant revisionism, often in profoundly inaccurate ways. It is the study of the thinkers of the past that enable us to learn to think critically. I doubt you would make a similar argument about art, or music, or literature. Likewise, in philosophy it behooves us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
1
@michaeltide
Hmmm. I think I am just looking at Philosophy and wondering why it is even a discipline. I sure don't see how my culture, such as it is, has Kant, Voltaire, or Hume as some sort of architectural underpinning. Get rid of Mozart, such a great pity. Get rid of the old masters who are seen as Masters of Philosophy, perhaps there is more room for something more useful.
We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, but the academic world hasn't noticed. There is no
"us" in philosophy.
Was Buddha a philosopher?
Just a street urchin here, chalking up the sidewalk.
Hugh
1
@Hugh Massengill
"Philosophy isn't a science.."
Hugh, neither is science.
No, you just did and your account questions their thoughts. Alas, I suspect few white supremists are reading Hume, Voltiere and Kant. To change a thinking mind is maybe different than to alter learned behaviour.
1
This is an immigration issue plain and simple. A situation in which a culture of people migrate from one region to another and then settle in someone else's homeland.
Hebrews were among the earliest ethnic groups to be forced to flee their homeland and thus settle elsewhere. There where countless others but by and large, by the time of Hume, Voltaire and Kant, most of these societies had long since disappeared into history. But not the Jew.
Some assimilated into their new surroundings so well that they were as much for country as they were for their religious ancestry (some more so). Others maintained their traditional lifestyle typically in closed communities. Gosh, doesn't all this sound far to familiar.
But the notions and writings for these classics are simply dealing with the same issues we face today. Fear or perhaps disgust of the outsider especially when leaders encourage revolt against them.
Had Judaism disappeared a few hundred years ago, today's editorial would not have a premise. But because the Jewish people have in fact survived as a unified race, albite one that has had to survive in the diaspora, they might very well be the longest lasting immigrant population. And we all know how inspired locals can be taught to view the immigrant.
3
The problem of anti-Semitism is its pervasiveness and persistence, and the professor identifies the stream coursing through a discipline based in classical Greek thought. I love reading Kant, who identified the highest form of the sublime with Jewish scripture, and it saddens me to learn he was a person of his own time with regard to attitudes toward living Jews. It shows that great thinkers have no special claim to morality: Heidegger’s association with the Nazi party comes to mind.
How can Professor Shrage’s insights help us? Anti-Semitic actions sponsored by powerful organizations such as church or state have been a part of Western history since the First Crusade. Slurs against Jews as morally subhuman yet superhuman in terms of secret powers (think of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Nazi ideology, or the Soviet version of Jews as capitalist colonizers) persist to this day within the discourses of both Right and Left.
As a Jew, I find such discourses frightening because the words have too often led to horrible actions. As an American Jew, I love Western literary traditions, including philosophy, despite awareness of how Jews, among others, have been treated with suspicion and hostility. I wish I felt greater optimism that the recognition of anti-Semitism in historical figures would lead to greater sensitivity to present-day forms of anti-Semitism.
3
I apologize in advance: I Kant believe some of these comments. I feel better now.
1
None of these philosophers can approach the anti-semitism of Martin Luther. He was not only exceptionally vile but he had a program that he and his followers advocated. William Shirer credits Luther with converting Germany from the country Jews fled to, as it was at his birth, to the one ripe for Hitler's rise.
However I still find other parts of Luther's theology very worth studying. And he was a talented musician. Neither "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" nor his still sung Christmas carols should require an annotation that he was a great monster of anti-semitism.
4
"...without mention of the harmful prejudices..."
That, is the hallmark of the insidious nature of progressive inculcation in our educational institutions. Warp history to suit current political goals.
Here is some food for thought :
Who decides what a harmful prejudice is, and when to censor, or expound, on it ?
Will such commentary be flagged at the beginning and end with a warning so that students know the professors personal opinion is being included in the presentation ?
Will alternative views be presented ?
Why is "anti-Semitism" a concern, but not other prejudices ?
Will Zionism also be flagged and presented as harmful ?
My two cents worth:
Any professor that poses such a question, should not be a professor.
1
Just as it is important to distinguish between opposition to a) Netanyahu's policies and b) anti-semitism, it is necessary to distinguish between between anti-religion and bigotry.
Hume and Voltaire were famously opposed to the politico-religious establishments of their times and places. Hume's "Of Miracles" is the most lucid critique of the foundations of religion in general and of christianity in particular. Voltaire's "Lettres Philosophiques" favorably contrasted the freedom of thought and and toleration that characterized the multiplicity of sects in England with the unitary catholic church in France.
Hume, "le bon David", and Voltaire were and are exemplars of critical thinking and open mindedness not just for 18th century England and France but for all peoples of all times.
Prof. Schrage, without citing any primary sources, lumps Voltaire and Hume together with Kant who is cited in her secondary sources as theorizing disparagingly about anthropological "essences".
Astonishingly, she lumps Wittgenstein, a jew, together with Heidegger, a nazi. She includes them both in her short list of anti-semites. Again, she cites no works of either.
There is a sophomoric fad in academia to seek out and attack non-PC ideas held by DWGs (dead white guys) in an attempt to establish one's reputation for hard nosed intellect and breadth of knowledge. This devolves into its own form of bigotry.
2
Prof. Shrage worries that some philosophers have been anti-semites. To be fair she should at least point out that some semites have been anti-philosopher.
Case in point is the excommunication of Spinoza by his synagogue.
Rebecca Goldstein's "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006)" can enlighten about the distinction between anti-semitism and the rejection of religious judaism.
3
Kant, like most of his Prussian contemporaries, was an anti-Semite. And so was Voltaire. But the charge against Hume is false. Popkin's arguments quoted by Schrage is a patent non-sequitur. Nowhere in the natural history does Hume defend a polygenetic theory. Nowhere I need his corpus does he express anti-semitism (although he was a racist), and he heaps equal scorn on all monotheistic religions. He is a bad poster child for anti-semitism in philosophy. Wittgenstein was from a Viennese Jewish family that converted to Christianity. He was an admirer of Freud. I am unaware of any anti-Semitism in his writings.
2
Just as it is important to distinguish between opposition to a) Netanyahu's policies and b) anti-semitism, it is necessary to distinguish between between anti-religion and bigotry.
Hume and Voltaire were famously opposed to the politico-religious establishments of their times and places. Hume's "Of Miracles" is the most lucid critique of the foundations of religion in general and of christianity in particular. Voltaire's "Lettres Philosophiques" favorably contrasted the freedom of thought and and toleration that characterized the multiplicity of sects in England with the unitary catholic church in France.
Hume, "le bon David", and Voltaire were and are exemplars of critical thinking and open mindedness not just for 18th century England and France but for all peoples of all times.
Prof. Schrage, without citing any primary sources, lumps Voltaire and Hume together with Kant who is cited in her secondary sources as theorizing disparagingly about anthropological "essences".
Astonishingly, she lumps Wittgenstein, a jew, together with Heidegger, a nazi. She includes them both in her short list of anti-semites. Again, she cites no works of either.
There is a sophomoric fad in academia to seek out and attack non-PC ideas held by DWGs (dead white guys) in an attempt to establish one's reputation for hard nosed intellect and breadth of knowledge. This devolves into its own form of bigotry.
4
The gist of this article is that we must accept the views of Torah. I choose not to accept Torah, and therefor I am an anti-Semite, according to Shrage. Luckily, I'm American and don't need to accept any thought systems.
2
@SF
"Luckily, I'm American and don't need to accept any thought systems."
Is this really what you intended to say.
Stating the obvious: The teaching of European musical history can’t ignore that early nineteenth century idealistic German nationalism (the switch from use of Italian to German tempo and stylistic markings) blew up into the late nineteenth century fanatical anti-Semitism of Liszt, Wagner, and Richard Strauss, who allowed himself to became a Nazi functionary. Hitler made no secret of how Wagner’s operas influenced and inspired his rise to power. The listener’s challenge is to appreciate the sheer brilliance of this music while considering both the era that produced it and the forces it unleashed.
1
Left out Magna Carta. Perhaps next time?
1
This is from Episode 11 of Jacob Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" series on the BBC,
"There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit. The assertion of dogma closes the mind and turns a nation, a civilization into a regiment of ghosts — obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false — tragically false.
Look for yourself.
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas — it was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people."
1
It is a fact that American culture largely (but not exclusively) originated in European cultures (please note the plural), and even today is largely (but not exclusively) European in nature. This means that a starting point for understanding philosophical thought for American students is that with which they grew up. That said, very early on in the study of philosophical thought, the American legacy should be contrasted with other views which are present (sometimes to a significant extent) in American culture. In other words, start with what's familiar and rapidly expand, never taking sides about an impossible ranking of philosophical orientations. That is the best way to teach. Prof. Shrage sometimes comes close but doesn't quite get there in this piece.
1
Prof. Shrage should put forth a clear, systematic sound definition of anti-Semitism as the groundwork for such an essay, instead of apparently believing that she just knows it when she sees it.
Critiques of aspects of Judiac thought are not, in themselves, displays of anti-Jewish bigotry.
Neither is omission of various aspects of Judaic thought that would tend to run counter to the path Western thought has plowed through the ages.
Philosophical principles are generally understood as being universal in their truth and applicability to all human beings, so any tribalist-based school of thought, such as Judaism, is going to tend to run aground in opposition to certain key principles.
Also, when many of its greatest luminaries, such as Maimonides, label belief in Christ, the religious bedrock of Western thought, as not merely untrue but downright idolatry, that orientation will tend to lead to self-marginalization.
2
@Rob Is monotheism "tribalist" according to your definition of Judaism? If so, then all three monotheisms are tribalist. Two of them are universalist and imperialist, while the other is merely "tribal." Can you guess which ones are which?
2
@Rob Jewish monotheism and moral code was never tribalist and have universal applicability. Even Jewish ritual is not necessarily forbidden to non-Jews, although much of it requires membership in a Jewish community, eg. conversion to Judaism. So do many of the divisions of Christianity. What you say is tribalist is really tolerance on the part of Jews, who never proselytized others or imposed their religion on others, as Christians often did, in an effort to justify their belief, and doing by committing genocide against the Jewish people. The truth is that pagan peoples chose Jesus as a God because they believed men could be gods, and only men, and only white men at that. This is antithetical to the Jewish god, who is transcendental, not understandable by humans, and above us all. It is in fact regrettable that most western civilization chose to believe in Jesus, which belief was actually retrogressive in terms of human thoughts about the nature of God. Especially nowadays, us humans could use a good dose of Jewish humility when it comes to thinking of ourselves as gods (see Trump and Maduro)
2
Most Europeans were infected by Catholicism's antagonism towards Jews, a mindset that had been developing ever since the heavy yoke of the Roman Empire and its savage oppression of the Jews exacerbated the schism in Jewish thinking in the early AD years, out of which emerged Christianity. Constantine added to the antipathy. European philosophers were products of their environments, just as the founders of this country were racists by today's standards, fully believing in the intellectual and religious superiority of white people. Should one expect a deist, like Voltaire, who on the one hand fought against the intellectual and other depredations of the Church and its power, to necessarily have totally shaken off his innate sense of superiority? The battles these philosophers fought were internecine in nature and were no more than a short stop in the right direction.
57
@Roger Caplan
Let's not forget that both Roman emperors Julius Caesar and Augustine did: giving Judaism as religion the state of "legal religion" in the entire empire (and with almost 10% of Rome's habitants being Jews, and many of them living in the big Roman cities on the Mediterranean coasts and North Africa, that meant having certain privileges that many other religions didn't have).
It's only centuries later, after the revolts of the Jews in Jerusalem against the Romans, that the emperors decided to temporarily expulse them from Jerusalem (not from the entire Empire). And during all these years, Christianity was not only NOT recognized as a legal religion, but Christians were persecuted by the Romans, as contrary to the Jews they wanted to impose their God everywhere, whereas the Roman Empire was polytheistic, which meant honoring the god of this or that place, when you live or go to that place. It's only with Constantine, in the fourth century AD, that Christianity all of a sudden became the official Roman religion, replacing polytheism.
So what would your arguments be to support the hypothesis that Christianity was born out of the tensions between Jews and Romans?
As to European philosophers being "products of their environment": by definition, philosophizing means questioning your own culture. So it does hurt a little bit more when it's precisely philosophers who take over racist thoughts, rather than abandoning them (such as Spinoza did for instance)...
7
Rome was not especially savage to the Jews. Consider how Rome acted toward Carthage. There was no Carthaginian diaspora. They killed all of the men and sold the women and children into slavery.
Every faith insists that it alone is the true faith. There are times when non believers are slaughtered in the name of “God”. Jews believe that they are “God’s” chosen people? So do most other faiths. It’s fine as long as we observe the 2nd Amendment and keep it private.
When asked if he believed in annihilation or life after death, Buddha refused to respond. Afterwards a friend asked why. He replied “No matter what, half the audience would be lost” He was only interested in enlightenment.
1
These men did not live in a Space above the physical worlds they wrote in, and were as susceptible to the predjuices and national feelings of their times as many of us are today.
However, their contributions to Western thought (in my University, Western and Eastern traditions are taught separately, which this is pointed out) were so immense and powerful that they have extended out of their era and into this modern one (even if it’s just a few decades).
Their teachings in a modern world mean that I sat every semester listening to my Jewish, Oxford-associated Professor talk about logic and language. He is a prolific writer and I am pretty sure he is reknowned in his field.
So yes, while Kant and Hume and all the rest might have been jerks relative to the acceptabilities of today, they weren’t for their time, and the adaptability of their major contributions to the lives we live today make their faults obsolete in an era of progress.
I do agree that we could incorporate more non-Western philosophies, but in the field of Communications, Eastern and Western traditions are very different and lecturing on both may prove incohesive for a university curricuulum, especially in graduate programs where we are supposed to be getting trained and building an area of specialization.
3
Anti-Semitism should be confronted, opposed and ended, among philosophers and anywhere else. However, the headline here is misleading. It's not as if philosophy, per se, is anti-Semitic. The article provides examples of certain philosophers who could be accused of anti-Semitism, and raises a useful concern about certain institutions supposedly devoted to philosophy being anti-Semitic. However, that is quite a different thing to philosophy itself being anti-Semitic. Such distinctions are important, as they are what prevent us from accusing the innocent and creating a fog of confusion in which the guilty can take cover. And of course making such distinctions, and avoiding such mistakes of logic, are also central to what I hope the writer would agree are the same analytical processes of philosophy that can best help us to oppose dangerously prejudicial phenomena like anti-Semitism. This article would have benefited from a clear explanation of how the writer defines philosophy (preferably at the outset), just as one would expect any diligent thinker to do when presenting an argument about contested terms, philosophical or otherwise.
9
@V.B. Zarr
"Anti-Semitism should be confronted, opposed and ended, among philosophers and anywhere else. "
How do you end a philosopher who has been dead for two hundred years?
2
I will be teaching Hume's Essay on Human Understanding and Kant's Prolegomena in a few weeks, as I have dozens of times.
There is nothing in either of these works that could be reasonably construed as promoting, or even vaguely suggesting anti-Semitism. Or, for example, misogyny.
I can't think a single pedagogical reason to distract the students from the positions and arguments put forward in these works by bringing up the topic at all. If it's not in the text we are studying, it is not relevant to the questions we are wrestling with.
20
@Tim Maudlin
As a retired academic in the analytic philosophy mould (and with Jewish ancestry), I couldn't agree more . Only when discussing Nietzsche did I have occasion to consider anti-semitism in philosophy - Kant 's Christian oriented' ethics drew attention for that reason, but, like Hume's skepticism on arguments for the existence of God, had no special significance to anti-semitism. One of the greatest logicians ever, Frege, was known to be highly anti-semitic, but no trace of this can be found in his most important works.
In fact the situation is probably more benign than in, say, English literature. Unlike works of philosophy that do not examine Jewish society in detail, many classic works here do incorporate extensive references to Jewish society, from the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta to 19th Century English novels. Accordingly, sensitive reading of this literature often requires attention to the personal attitudes of the authors towards Jews. However, this is only one element in these works and a common critical comment is that they must be evaluated in the context of the time they were written, where Jews were an essentially separate and, indeed, disparaged group. Given an awareness of that context, these works can and should be read for their literary merit, not conventional anti-semitic elements.
The more so for the major works of Western philosophy as there is so little explicit reference to semitic or anti- semitic themes.
6
Norman Malcolm at Cornell taught me that philosophy is not the history of philosophy. A fortiori, it is not the history of philosophers and their personal shortcomings.
15
I know I'll get slammed for this comment, but there is a reason Europeans colonized the Americas and Africa and not the reverse. Yes, other cultures have made major contributions - including the Arabic numerical system we still use - but from roughly the time of Columbus, European culture has dominated the rest of the world.
You can argue about why that is, but it's hard to deny the extent of this domination.
2
@J. Waddell
By adding the comment in this context, you imply that Europeans colonized many parts of the world because their culture was/is superior to other cultures. That conclusion does not follow, and the opposite could easily be argued.
5
@J. Waddell
In ASCENT OF MAN, Bronowski said the reason the Americas didn't cross the sea was because their astronomy lacked the concept of the wheel and rotational motion, and therefore could not be used to aid navigation. Nothing to do with general cultural superiority.
3
@J. Waddell, Your comment is questionable to say the least. If you would investigate the various interactions between Western Europe and the rest of the world you would find a great deal of awe at the wealth and sophistication of the rest of the world in the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. There was also fear. The largest polities in the world were the Chinese, Ottoman, and Russian empires, with the Persians running close behind. The Europeans were traders from a poor and backward part of the world.
3
I believe it's overdue to point out anti-semitic (and other) prejudices when dealing with a thinker of the past. But this also requires that thinkers who argued emphatically AGAINST anti-semitism (like Nietzsche) should be pointed out--otherwise, one blind spot would be replaced by another blind spot.
1
So a Eurocentric view of history, culture, and philosophy is also anti-Semitic. How could it not be? Not to mention anti-Muslim, anti-African, anti-Asian, and pro-slavery. At least in general. Nothing new in that. But let's turn that toward a history of ideas that takes responsibility for the way ideas are historically constructed and connected. Contemporary philosophy remains largely colorblind, blind to its own cultural prejudices, refusing to closely examine the reprehensible beliefs that shape the greatest contemporary ideas.
3
@Stephen “Contemporary philosophy remains largely colorblind, blind to its own cultural prejudices, refusing to closely examine the reprehensible beliefs that shape the greatest contemporary ideas” - an absurd thing to say, given that in the last fifty years or so Philosophy has basically become a critical project. There is literally no one, even in the “anglo-analytic” sphere of influence, doing grand metaphysical/moralistic systematizing, except maybe the odd Marxist - and Marxism is a critique of Hegel anyway. That being said, the very same institutional barriers that people like Foucault et al identify in their work are still in place. But, um, Foucault and others did identify them. I mean, where do you think that post-colonialism and feminism came from? It was people within the philosophic tradition, or on the margins of it, like Fanon and De Beauvoir, as well as the Frankfurt School, etc, criticizing the tradition for exactly the reasons you point out. Like, the type of “refusing to closely examine the reprehensible beliefs that shape contemporary ideas” that you say is absent from a Philosophy has actually been going on for almost a hundred years, at least since Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno does exactly that. No, Philosophy qua Philosophy is very much aware of its problematic history, as, e.g., anyone who thinks there’s value in teaching Heidegger while despising his politics can attest.
2
I think the Jewish contribution to almost every human endeavor speaks for itself. I have lecture notes that Kant gave that rank human beings into Nordic Caucasian at the top, the Indo-Caucasian, "Yellows" etc. in 2nd and third places, and ends with the Africans. As my grandmother said to me repeatedly, we have to read and think critically, and, not accept everything written as TRUE; we can then take the good and throw out the rest, even if it came from a great thinker.
3
What a breath of fresh air! While Professor Shrage makes a strong case for reform in Philosophy, there is ample room for similar soul-searching, as it were, in other disciplines, including History and the Humanities broadly. I find it amazing (and appalling) how much of what we think about the world broadly was so deeply shaped by prejudices of the 19th- and 18th-Century intelligentsia. Thank you for making the case.
6
It's quite normal that these philosophers were speaking through a western christian lens because that was the culture they were trying to make sense out of. There was very little exposure to other cultures and philosophical practices of the rest of the world. From many an eastern perspective their judeo/christian world-view would look rather pagan and unsophisticated.
I believe more so that these philosophers' anti-semitism was more to do with the conventions of the times than as integral to their philosophies. Same way I believe our founding fathers opinions on race were not all that integral to their basic concepts of the individual and government. In fact they had to do an end-run around their own ideas to make the existing attitudes on race somehow legitimate.
Even Nietzsche held the conventional negative biases toward Jews and Judaism yet, at least, decried anti-semitism in general (which was more than most did at that time).
1
Did these thinkers really "develop elaborate justifications for anti-Semitic views" or did they simply follow their trains of thought in directions that we now perceive as "anti-Semitic"? Is it perhaps even anachronistic to speak of "anti-Semitism" in the eighteenth century, when the concept had not yet been developed? I don't have firm answers to these questions, but I do think we should try to understand these thinkers in the context of their own times, rather than judging them by contemporary standards.
6
@Boria Sax Its rather complicated. Take, for example, Schopenhauer. He argued that the fundamental animating force of reality was a blind, amoral, insatiable “Will” and that our attempts to satiate it are the ground of all suffering. He saw this teaching preserved more or less in both Eastern religions and polytheistic ones, and thought, with the exception of mystics, it was lost in the Abrahamic faiths, and most of his vitriol is directed at Christianity. But, no Judiaism, no Christianity (or Islam, which he equally derides). Thus, he condemns the “Jews” for introducing “the historical abberation of monotheism” to the world. Antisemetic? I mean, superficially, sure, but when your “antisemeticism” is derived from your “anti-Christianism” which in turn is derived from your attempt to explain the nature of suffering, which leads you to embrace Hinduism and Buddhism I don’t know. Those certainly aren’t the usual patterns of anti-Semitic thinking.
1
For a broad introduction to philosophy, especially a historical one, it is suitable to discuss prejudices (racial, ethnic, gender, etc.) that philosophers have had, as well as the exclusion of non-Western philosophy from academic philosophy (in arbitrary and non-arbitrary ways). This puts into context the idea that philosophers are well-equipped pursuers of wisdom, and that philosophy seeks abstract truth. Basically, it's an asterisk.
When you get beyond the historical and cultural introduction to Western philosophy and look at specific philosophical problems, its relevancy is simply determined by the particular subject.
2
Philosophy was hijacked by Oxbridge wannabes a century ago (linguistic analysis) to become the "British analytic tradition". Deliberately devoid of ideas, its focus was on picayune Brit-speak nitpicking as subject matter, always colonizing anglophone universities' departmental budgets toward the holiest of grails: tenure.
Today a philosophy grad has to feign knowledge of neuroscience to sound at all relevant, but to no avail. As our species faces the death of our planet this century, no comment will be forthcoming from 'philosophy', beyond rehashing the classics of Greece or Wittgenstein one more time.
If the Humanities continue to recede from university curricula, the arid landscape left by this overt cult deserves to be the first to be reassigned to honest academics.
2
@Dwight Jones
I think your position is overstated. I have a PhD in and teach in the history of philosophy and I would never say anything so silly as that the British Analytic Tradition is "devoid of ideas."
"As our species faces the death of our planet this century, no comment will be forthcoming from 'philosophy', beyond rehashing the classics of Greece or Wittgenstein one more time."
That's weird. I was teaching Hume this morning and had a great conversation with my students about non-belief in global warming and how Hume's project is meant to combat such superstition.
Also, there is a robust subfield in philosophy devoted to environmental ethics. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
26
@The Lorax
Leave out the Ph.D. next time and I teach the old etcetera. Let your ideas stand on their own--after all, as one of my stat profs said, to paraphrase: a Ph.D. is really a hobby writ large in academia.
2
@Dwight Jones
Although I wouldn't formulate it the way you do, I do agree with your main message here.
The main problem with "analytical philosophy" is that it decided to reject the entire history of philosophy, imagining that as scientists don't have to study Newton to become outstanding physicians, somehow the same should go for philosophy too.
The explicit goal of analytical philosophy is to find definitions of words that would somehow better capture what "we" mean by them when using them than what a dictionary does. No wonder that they never find those definitions, as "by definition" language is equivocal. The worse is that they imagine that IF they would find such a definition, somehow they would also touch upon the truth of that which that word refers to in the real world. Until recently, that obliged them to throw away all metaphysics, but now even "analytical metaphysics" exists, where the same absurd methodology is applied to words such as "being", etc.
The specificity of philosophy is that:
1. there is no "progress", so a 17th century "great" philosophy isn't necessarily more or less true/interesting/... than a great 20th century philosophy, and
2. the only way to learn how to philosophize is to first spend years trying to reconstruct the concepts of great philosophies of the past, because that's where a philosopher, like any artisan, can learn his profession. And that's totally different from taking quotes out of context, as analytical philosophers do...
3
This is a chilling essay. It illustrates how the though police have infiltrated academia. How every subject must be approached in a politically correct way.
Except perhaps the sciences.
Take Isaac Newton for example. He revolutionized the way the world looks at physics. But he also published views on religion, including works trying to analyze the prophecies in Revelation. Should we regard his physics as flawed because he may have yielded to the pressure in his day to say something about religion, and appear to be devout? Or did he simply adapt prejudices of the time?
In physics, people mostly ignore Newton' writings on religion. It's not that they don't give some insight into the history of science. But nobody would think that these religious works somehow tarnish a reputation built on penetrating works in a different direction.
This essay seems to be a contribution to a disturbing trend within academia. Take some great person's character flaws and hold him or her up for public shaming using current valued culled from political correctness.
Thus Beethoven should be publicly shamed because he mistreated his nephew, Albert Einstein because his affairs were misogynistic, the operas of Mozart were racist and sexist, and the list goes on and on.
Why not simply accept that the great philosophers tried to understand the answers to difficult questions, and were often wrong? If they were fallible, why be surprised if they adopted prejudices of their times?
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@Jake Wagner - Could it be that your own insecurities are rising to the top? I don't read this essay as imposing "thought police" on anyone. Instead, I see the author asking for philosophy academicians and those interested in philosophy to view these writings through a wider lens. The author never suggests that the philosophers mentioned are great or not great. But she does urge a wider context. Why not include Maimonades within the context of philosophers to study? Are you afraid that your limited world view will be tested?
Perhaps more people should view the "great" men and woman who contributed to arts, science, philosophy, music, etc. as humans who are both great and flawed rather than deities not to be touched. Maybe then we can recognize that "greatness" lives among us, can come from any corner of the world, and comes in many forms.
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@Elise Hiller just as the author argues we cannot understand the philosophy without critiquing the philosopher, you've given Ms. Shrage a big pass.
According to her wikipedia article, "Laurie J. Shrage is an American political and moral philosopher whose analysis of the agendas for social change advanced by gender and sexual dissidents has been influential."
This is a writer seeped in views that mainstream society is corrupt and oppressive. Any chance she may be biased here?
4
@Jake Wagner
This isn't about a CHARACTER's flaws, it's about a PHILOSOPHY's potentially harmful concepts, whereas the core invention in philosophy is the invention of concepts, remember?
Kant was a philosopher of religion. So if his professional work includes a concept of Jews that is racist and false, the QUESTION becomes: to what extent was this concept fundamental to his philosophy or not?
When a scientist like Newton spends his free time thinking about religion, then of course those studying science don't need to study his writings about religion. You also don't study neurology if you want to become an engineer. You actually don't even study Newton's writings if you study physics, because in science, contrary to what is (or should be ...) the case when you study philosophy, there is something called "progress", so you actually only study contemporary writings (which include scientific equations invented in the past and still true now, but NOT the writings of long gone scientists).
So philosophies aren't exactly "fallible" either. Philosophy is about inventing new modes of thinking, on those subjects where scientific proof is absent or irrelevant.
We do have the right though to reject certain philosophical concepts for moral - and as a conseqeence political - reasons.
Rejecting concepts that are anti-Semitic IS such a moral choice.
Studying whether great philosophies contain them is as a consequence highly important, no matter what politics you adhere to.
4
Do we skip regarding Picasso in a survey of the history and philosophy of art because of his treatment of women?
Or do we acknowledge it, ponder it, theorize about it, and let in infuse our otherwise appreciation of his contribution?
Isn't the argument that Ms Shrage making similar to this or, even more reductively, the question of how to square the circle of our brilliant Founding Fathers owning slaves?
It is up to us in our age to extrude what is valuable from previous ages, and to acknowledge historical foibles and sins, but taking time to condemn those in the past by our contemporary standards seems a waste.
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@DD
That's not a valid argument.
Picasso (as Michael Jackson) has created art of the highest possible level, AND has in his personal life adopted behavior that today we reject for moral and political reasons, as we choose to build a different kind of society.
In the case of philosophers, however, their "core business" is creating new philosophical concepts and philosophies. And as all philosophers named here are also, professionally, philosophers of religion, scholars of the history of philosophy HAVE to study whether their concepts of religion are morally/politically acceptable today or not.
And remember, this op-ed isn't calling for censoring those philosophies, it's merely calling for real, scientifically valid studies of those philosophies, and asks the question of whether teaching them from now on means ALSO mentioning these findings.
More broadly, this op-ed is calling for a more inclusive conception of introduction in philosophy and of how to practice philosophy, appointing Faculty members etc., precisely because limiting ourselves to Western philosophers because they are the greatest or perfect, is no longer a valid argument, as her findings show.
And those things will only change when "we the people" vote for politicians who want them to change. So yes, non-philosophers have to be informed of these findings too.
2
How about Aristotle, speaking of philosophers. Though he said nothing about the Jews, as far as I know, he did explain that certain members of the human race are inferior by nature in his Politics. Such an idea could be applied to any group quite handily, but Aristotle was specifically talking about women and slaves, thus justifying ancient Greek attitudes and social castes. The founders of the United States were influenced by Aristotle, or at least found in him a very convenient rationalization since the majority of them were slavers and it's obvious that they thought women didn't deserve any political franchise. Overall the idea that some people are naturally inferior, not equal or worthy of equal rights, is still a very expedient way to explain injustice.
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@J.Sutton
I read that around 1500 AD the Holy Roman Empire Charles V ordered a debate on slavery. Slavery was opposed by a monk, de las Casas. Slavery was defended by an Aristotelean philosopher named Sapulveda. A century later Galileo was harassed for criticizing the teachings of St. Aristotle.
" he said nothing about the Jews, as far as I know,"
Aristotle probably did not know that Jews existed. In his lifetime Judea was a small Persian province being attacked by Alexander "the Great".
@Charlesbalpha Well, whether Aristotle knew of Jews or not, they were certainly in existence, as you point out. And I'll add they had been existing thousands of years before Aristotle. But the point of my comment above was to illustrate how certain philosophers have long justified injustice towards certain groups. And where one group is treated unjustly, Jews such as myself believe that it could extend to ourselves and often does. We know this from thousands of years of persecution.
1
"A better question is: Should those who teach their works and ideas in the 21st century share them without mentioning the harmful stereotypes these thinkers helped to legitimize?"
Yes and no. Depends on the context. If I'm teaching Hume's dialogue concerning religion, then, yes, it's fair game. If I'm teaching Hume's Enquiry, I fail to see the relevance of Hume's prejudice to the material.
When I teach Aristotle's Metaphysics, I do not bring up his ridiculous views on women, because it is not relevant to the science. When teaching his Ethics or Politics, then, yes, I bring these things up. Aristotle himself brings them up.
I do not want to cover over racism in the history of philosophy. But I'm not going to go out of my way to highlight it unless it is relevant to the material being taught.
Also, good professors of philosophy ALWAYS raise ethical implications of epistemology. I bet my bottom Ms. Shrage does it, too!
37
During the nineteen sixties, for my Honours English and Philosophy degree at McGill University in Montreal, I remember studying the Renaissance movement, and European and British philosophy and literature, and being struck by the absence of any mention of Judaism as the great monotheistic religion of ancient times, or of Jewish intellectual thought as a framework for Christian thought. We moved from the notion of the creation of the world by a benevolent God to the mediaeval Christian thinkers, without a mention of Abahamic monotheism or the strikingly humane laws of the Talmud.
13
@fearing for Excuse me. The strikingly humane laws are in The Torah!
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@fearing for
Thomas Aquinas studied Jewish and Muslim philosophers when he was formulating official Catholic theology. But of course, traditional religion was what the Renaissance was rebelling against.
Glass houses and deception abound. If we refuse to look in the mirror that underscores what's sound. The nature of obfuscating a multidimensional betrayal, is not in itself a semitic devise nor is it an outright judgement of innocence of enslavement. The truth is more sanguine. Yes indeed there's an endgame played in the elevated silos of manipulation where conspiracy is at first ordained until a reckoning enables a false cleanse in the scapegoating of derangement. Yes indeed it's a parable of historical accuracy that prescribes hypocrisy, duplicity, and complicity when from the ashes the game is reset. It's nothing more and this much is true, when one refuses to look in order to find, is the calculus of avarice in crime.
1
Should we continue to teach thinkers like Kant, Voltaire and Hume without mention of the harmful prejudices they helped legitimize?
Absolutely not. A good teacher would point out the inherent prejudices and discuss it within the context and culture of the times they wrote as well.
14
disclosure: I majored in philosophy and became a cardiologist. My thoughts:
(1) The teaching of philosophy has great value and its foundation as described by Plato, is the Socratic dialogue and inquiry.
(2) I believe one can read the classics of philosophy, Hume, Voltaire, and Kant, and challenge their ideas, independent of the political context of their times, as it is the universality of their ideas which has stood the test of time.
It was precisely the exploration of philosophical thought, that led me to reject the leaps of faith of existentialism, and adopt the critical thinking paradigm of Socratic humanism as my path to decision making. One can them frame today's politics within the context of a philosophical point of view. Trump's exhortations of MAGA and "Build that Wall" are nothing more than Kantian categorical imperatives. That's precisely why I would never adopt a Kantian point of view. At the same time, that's precisely why I believe that understanding Kant's way of thinking is of critical importance. I studied all of this in Philosophy 101 and am glad I did.
14
@ a phycisian... I do not doubt you took an intro course, 101, that included Kant but your understanding of what a categorical imperative is shows a failing grade. Any inconsistencies in Kant's application of philosophy to the real world aside, and there are multiple ones, the essence of the categorical imperative requires that the prescribed action be valid and just regardless of who you are. Bigotry not only fails but is the antithesis of the categorical imperative.
2
@A physician. I have to STRONGLY disagree with your comparison of an opportunistic reality show star and ripoff artist's twisted exhortations, with the categorical imperative's as a decision making tool: it requires us to examine our motives. No, as a tool for ethical decision making it is far from perfect, but Trump's rhetoric is pure self serving fantasyland, the exact opposite of Kantian. Perhaps you should have dug a bit deeper than 101.
3
"I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and in his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."
---Adam Smith on his friend, David Hume
As others have commented, David Hume was skeptical about the epistemological foundation of all religions based on the existence of a transcendental being. His "Dialogues on Natural Religion" is commonly thought to present the most destructive argument about the truth of religious beliefs.
Hume and Locke were the founders of the empirical tradition in philosophy, whose most important exponents in 20th century philosophy have been Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, and Willard van Orman Quine.
Why would a teacher spend any time in an introductory course on the question of whether Hume and Kant, the two greatest philosophers in the modern western tradition, hated Jews. The answers are unknowable and trivial. Ms Shrage's piece is a politically correct attempt to argue that all philosophical traditions are equally valuable.
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@Diogenes
I think the more salient point is that epistemological and metaphysical commitments have ethical implications rather than that this or that philosopher held racist views.
Also, if one loves the truth, one will seek it out everywhere. The only way to decide whether different traditions are more profound and explanatory is actually to study them.
Isn't a liberal arts education supposed to free us up from our prejudices? Is your reaction ("Ms Shrage's piece is a politically correct attempt to argue that all philosophical traditions are equally valuable.") particularly liberal, in that sense?
6
@Diogenes
"Why would a teacher spend any time in an introductory course on the question of whether Hume and Kant, the two greatest philosophers in the modern western tradition, hated Jews."
Anti-Semitism has had, shall we say, significant historical impact, and strands of thought are not so readily separable as you seem to think they are. Why would even an introductory course *not* attempt to at least sketch out a complete picture of these philosophers' ideas and those ideas' influence on history?
Having grown up in a time when high school history courses still presented the US Civil War as a matter of "states' rights," I experienced the intellectual betrayal entailed by the whitewashing you find appropriate. "Political correctness," in my experience, often equals a discomfiting honesty.
7
Exactly my sentiments.
1
The question of whether personal shortcomings, or worse, invalidate an individual's intellectual, artistic or social contributions is ever-present, not just in philosophy, but in all walks of life. There is no clear answer.
3
Philosophical (and other) texts should not be accepted as infallible but rather as a starting point for contemporary thought.
In this context, Shrage's concerns are overblown.
9
Professor Shrage forgot to mention that from about the 1940s the United States has declared itself as having been founded as a Judeo-Christian nation.
That very phrase is an oxymoron par excellence, and none of the Founding Fathers ever considered the founding as such.
On the contrary, the very first sentence in the Constitution forbids an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
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@Sarah
Not exactly as stated.
The Founding Fathers were deists, deeply rooted in the Bible, and felt intensely that the survival of a republic depends on a basic moral and religious code of behavior and thought among the populace.
They, therefore, because of the strong belief in a universal moral standard, knew the absolute requirement to guarantee freedom of worship.
I liked this article, because it implies holes in the Western philosophy of ethics. Without the revelation at Sinai with its monotheism, respect for the sanctity
of life , regard for property, and the importance of the family, the world would be in even worse shape than it has been.
5
@complex subject: The Deists had no explanation for the creation of the universe other than God, who they believed left it to operate automatically forever after, thus making idolatry futile. The US developed its addiction to religion decades after the Revolution.
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@complex subject
Hume, of course, notes well that "freedom to worship" is an oxymoron.
2
As usual in this column, purely academic and isolated argument, of very little general interest or impact, is put into the blender with many other diffuse concepts, like religion. So, we have people conflating history, contemporary formal philosophy, contemporary cultural concepts, and maybe even Hollywood. In my hardly educated opinion as a working physicist, this melange gets close to imagining debates between fans of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and some 18th century opinionator. Of importance to academics, as it should be, is the extremely long history of antisemitism in our culture, and whether or not it really conditions the employment of professional philosophers as it does pretty much everywhere else. Not to worry; unless their departments suddenly become important to the economics of the academy, just a non-issue, among many.
8
Christianity is and isn't an outgrowth of Judaism. In the time of Christ, it was a Jewish entreprise, a Jewish heresy. Later, the Alexandrian Jewish intellectuals, especially Philo, shaped it significantly.
In time, the Old Testament was seen as mainly figurative. Because of this difference from the New Testament, the Jewish Bible became less and less authoritative, and less and less part of the Christian tradition.
With the spread of Islam, Jews were absorbed into the Muslim world, where along with Persians, they formed the nucleus of the "Arab" intelligentsia.
From roughly 700 AD to 1500 AD, Spain was Muslim, and not part of Europe. Maimonides lived in Spain during this period. Thus, it is not racism, but truth, to exclude him from the European tradition.
The Islamic intellectuals, including the Jewish ones, were in possession of many of Aristotle's works: the Eastern Church had saved these. The Western Church had burned them as works of the Devil, back during the Dark Ages. The great philosophical influence of Islamic philosophers on Europe was the transmitting of this ancient work back to west Europe.
That is, ironically, the main effect of Islamic thought on Europe lay in reinforcing its European tradition.
Finally, the claim of suppression of the non-European is overwrought. Though tangential, Jewish and Islamic thought is part of, eg Russell's and Copleston's histories, which spend some pages on Philo and Maimonides. Ditto for Avicenna, et al.
18
@alyosha To exclude Maimonides from European tradition is to ignore his importance on the develoment of Apophatic theology and his influence upon the thinking of Aquinas and Duns Scotus. As for Islamic intellectals, if there work had truly been purged from Europe in the Dark Ages, the writings of Ibn Rushd would not have been so available and influential on the development of "European" thinking as to prompt Aquinas to write De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.
3
@alyosha
"The Western Church had burned them as works of the Devil, back during the Dark Ages. "
I don't think there is any record of this happening. The writings survived in the East because they were predominantly in the East to start with. That's where the intellectual centers were: Athens, Alexandria, and maybe Constantinople.
1
@APS
You know, I'm one of 17 people who know what apophatic means. Which means, I know you're right and I'm wrong. Also, I need to acknowledge the influence of Avicenna on my main man, Abelard.
Thanks.
1
Can philosophy still be a "western" study in the 21st century? Does it teach only a "Christian" view of humanity? Are the ideas of Kant and the others taught as dogma?
If so, the author is pointing out graffiti on the wall while the building is burning to the ground.
8
What problem is solved by including Philo of Alexandria in the syllabus of a Philosophy 101 course?
I can only think of one: the problem that those students who sign up for that Philosophy 101 course are unfamiliar with Philo of Alexandria.
3
Is Anti-Semitism anticipated and warned about in the Bible, when viewed from a philosophical perspective? The Rebellious Son. To be rebellious was not simply an issue related to obedience. To be rebellious means to turn away from Knowledge. In God's economy, all knowledge is divine. Ignorance is the product of fear and is therefore the only serious form of rebellion. Tribalism, the fear of strangers and the fear of knowledge are rebellions against God. Trump's MAGA, and nationalism are examples of secular tribalism. Anti-Semitism is a reaction to a tribe that uses separation from others as a fundamental right to identity. People who desire knowledge and the experience of knowledge that comes from mixing are more probably going to break down walls in order to gain access to them. That's what the Exodus is for. Sadly, tribal identity is less able to withstand the pressures that come from the human journey toward full integration and equality. Anti-Semitism will end, in all it's anti-tribal forms, when that is accomplished.
6
@Maxine and Max -- or really, @those who recommended this post: with its allusive vagueness and incantatory conviction worthy of a Dr Bronner's soap label, what is this post actually saying?
First, the theology of this post is confusing. In Devarim/Deuteronomy, the rebellious son is one who disobeys his parents, which isn't necessarily the same as turning away from knowledge. After all, a few books earlier, the principle of honoring one's father and mother had been kind of engraved in stone. And in Bereshis/Genesis, eating fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was itself the rebellion: fear of eating the fruit was the ticket to stay in Gan Eden. The point of Torah is that you're being obedient by being Jewish, not rebellious at all. This post flips most of these things around.
Moreover, the post seems to be saying that identifying as Jewish is being tribal and rebellious, and that if Jews want anti-Semitism to end, they have to achieve "full integration and equality" with everyone. I'm not sure what that means exactly: if I try to treat everyone equitably but I decline a BLT or a ham and cheese when it's offered to me, am I being tribal?
If so, then it sure sounds as if Jews are to blame for anti-Semitism, according to M&M. I.e., this is no soap label. I wonder if -- I hope that -- those who recommended it simply didn't understand it.
1
@Maxine and Max
No, you cannot possibly claim that "anti-Semitism is a reaction to a tribe that uses separation from others as a fundamental right to identity".
ALL human groups have "a fundamental right to identity". And "separation from others" isn't central in the theology, philosophy and daily lives of many Jews.
So you can't take certain Jewish theories and then extrapolate them to an entire population - let alone use those theories to justify racism. Doing so is actually the exact DEFINITION of racism, remember?
By the way, contrary to Christian theology, in Judaism there is no one "authority" that can declare certain statements to be "eternal dogma". In Judaism, God incites Jews to come up with always new interpretations of the Bible. In that sense, cultivating the desire of knowledge is at the very heart of most versions of Judaism.
Conclusion: only when clear knowledge of what racism and as a consequence anti-Semitism actually means, is spread to every corner in the world (including Brooklyn), will anti-Semitism end ... ;-)
1
@A.J. Sutter
Thank you.
I mean that when we see the word rebellious in the text we presume it's about how to correct a child. I'm suggesting that there is only one real form of rebellion: ignorance. Ignorance, fueled by fear. Xenophobia and depriving the other's otherness of the hospitality that is probably the first pillar of civilization. To rebel against including others is therefore the rebelliousness in the biblical passage. Hospitality is not just a theological concept but a philosophical one. Cultures that shut their doors to the otherness of others are Rebellious ones, for they disobey the prime directive that was the most important law, in the desert, at the time the Bible was created. Anti-semitism is often reaction of the larger society against the closed society within it. What we call Anti-semitism is, I think, a larger reaction against the breaking of the universal hospitality law that governed society during biblical times. Thank you for encouraging me to elaborate on this insight. I may be totally wrong, but I should have been more clear.
3
Plato and Aristotle probably had some viewpoints on women that would be considered quite horrific by the current standard. Should we stop learning about their contributions to philosophy?
5
@Ben ... That's a straw man. You're attributing to the author a position she isn't taking.
1
On point: I arrived at the University of Toronto to pursue a Ph.D in Philosophy. I took classes with the eminent scholar Emile Fackenheim on Hegel. One of the notable accounts within the University' past is how professor Fackenheim took on the Philosophical Curriculum of the University's internationally famous Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, under the direction of the likewise eminent Etienne Gilson. Fackenheim argued , and succeeded ,in having Maimonides included in the Institutes' curriculum- at the time an important philosophical victory! After all 'Philosophy'[Philo-Sophia!} is the Universal pursuit of Wisdom! Western thought can always be spiced up with varied ethnic dishes to make it more accessible and coherent: in this case a little Chicken Soup might make one slightly more clear minded?
21
Philosophy can't throw out Kant because philosophy is Kant, which is why he is considered so significant.
The very notion of considering human reason within the context of experience is the essence of Kant.
The question, rather, is "should we continue to teach philosophy?"
But we've already answered that: we have stopped teaching philosophy. Philosophy is an academic specialty that has no direct effect on our culture, even if it forms the foundation on which our culture rests.
Our president represents the absence of philosophy, for example. The human project for him is a pragmatic, reflexive utilitarianism, and he cannot articulate it, even if he were asked to, which he never is, because the media and journalism also represent the absence of philosophy.
What we teach is science. That's it. The humanities have been replaced by feminism and related "social sciences" that are really just codes for appropriate behavior of the middle class, i.e. "respect others' identities" -- don't be anti-semitic, for example, even though nobody actually knows what that is in any historical sense. The opposite of "harmful prejudice" is, roughly, "be nice." I realize there's a certain strain of intellectual that disdains this "bourgeois moralizing;" their snobbism misses not only how crucial our mores are but what a massive triumph they signify.
23
@Joy. (Just wanted to write “@Joy”) Correct, but I think that the president lacks more than philosophy. I do take issue with our not teaching philosophy; there do seem to be enough courses with that title to indicate that the academic version is still around, whether or not it is appreciated by anyone outside of the trade itself.
3
@Joy, as a chemist, i'd point out that the vast majority of chemistry and other basic science being taught has profound, but indirect effects on us. it's almost always mediated by technology or biology.
i do apply directly the study of philosophy called 'logic'. and as an m.d. i employ some other branches directly, such as 'ethics'. the effect on culture is indirect, via the effect on the patient, the general thinking of right and wrong that comes from considering actions in the public sphere.
6
@Joy. After Plato we might acknowledge that Socrates' and Khashoggi's executions, as well as The Donald's presidency partake of this massive triumph, no?
2
Perhaps Ms. Shrage can explain why 'polygenetic' has a negative connotation in this context. Both Hume and Kant knew full well that we all are subject to a variety ('poly-') of influences ('gene-'), whether inborn or acquired through experience. They both drew very different conclusions: Hume thought we acted the way we did, and knew the things we knew, based primarily on habit and repetition; and Kant tried to show how we might be tuned into something even more profound or universal than that (the world, if any, behind appearances). Their ignorance of many strands of thought emanating from the middle east does not disqualify their arguments as such. Philosophers are most likely to be misunderstood when we ignore the historical 'polygeny' of their influences, however, and this goes just as well for study of Hume and Kant. Ms. Shrage, for example, seems to ignore the variety that exists within the rubric 'Christianity.' Neither Kant or Hume were Catholic and might well have been persecuted by the Pope if they had been. As an aside, I still think these historical / ethical questions are relevant, but not decisive in evaluating their contributions to epistemology. To have read either without understanding that they were reacting to and influenced by the sciences at the time (from Galileo to Copernicus and Newton, Leibniz and Descartes) would be, in my view irresponsible. The question remains, how much of knowledge (-sophy) is universally valid, or should be regarded as such?
5
@Tom Schuman: I think the problem with "polygenetic" here is that it's the anthropological concept, not about philosophical influences. In the context of anti-Semitism, the idea that the Jews form a separate lineage from Europeans lets them be an exception to the whole project of searching for truths applicable to all humanity. The same huge error applies to the way those early idealists thought about the rest of the world also: their philosophy should have led them directly to a universal humanism, but they were socially rooted in a world where racism was developing its pseudoscientific theories and practices. Thomas Jefferson was another example of this philosophical failure: he had the intellectual framework, but he couldn't make the leap of actually believing what his philosophy told him was true. There were people who did make that leap: the fault isn't in the philosophy, it's in the people who fail to follow their philosophy where it should lead them.
9
@John BergstromThanks for the clarification and I mostly agree with what you said. Still, the religions themselves, whichever monotheism you care to choose, have done as much as any other secular force to encourage the idea that there was only one 'origin' of human life, i.e., Adam & Eve and their ancestors in Genesis, etc. and that there is 'only one God'. I find my way past these fundamentalisms much better by reading Voltaire, Kant and Hume than I would by reading a thousand years of theologists (whether Christian, Judaic or Muslim) defending their holy books and chosen monotheisms to the letter. The learning curve, though, is steep as always. And I have always been critical of Kant's brand of transcendentalism (idealism) which wanders into mysticism, and yes, with questionable anthropological assumptions.
5
@John Bergstrom
After the decline of Biblical realism and before the rise of evolutionary theory there was a lot of confusion about the origin of men. Racists would take advantage of this to say that they had more glorious origins than "inferior" groups.
It is understandable that these great thinkers held Anti Semitic views, when one considers that most Jews in the middle ageswere confined to Ghettoes where Orthodox Literal interpretation of the old testament was taught, and lived by.It wasn’t until Napoleon, that universities were open to Jews that jews became more enlightened to the Sciences, and became secular.Today the greater majority of Jews are secular & do not take the scriptures literally, although most still hold onto cultural Holidays, mixed with Chinese food.
It’s the secular Jews that are listed as Nobel laureates. In many areas Jews have moved beyond the Christian world in the Sciences & literature, and are path finders for others to follow.
13
@Independent1776
With all respect, that's entirely false.
1. Many sources have proven that Jews in the Middle Ages were in constant contact with Christians, worked with and for them, and often had good relationships with them.
2. Medieval Jewish philosophy is perfectly comparable with medieval Muslim and Christian philosophy, and as a consequence highly interested in science.
3. Rashi, one of the most important Rabbis if the last 2,500 years, has developed an exegesis of the Jewish Bible that you cannot possibly call "literalist" - and he was a 12th century scholar living in France, and regularly invited by Christian theologians for public debates about religion.
The whole idea of Jewish exegesis being "material" or "literalist" has been invented by Christians, and proven to be wrong ...
4. NO disagreement on the interpretation of ancient sacred texts can ever be an excuse for racist views such as anti-Semitism, which rejects ALL Jews, regardless of their religious practice as individuals.
5. Apart from that it is indeed understandable that philosophers take over part of their culture's prejudices, as no philosopher has ever been able to change thinking in such a way that ALL prejudices disappear from his philosophy. One of the reasons why Kant is such a "great" philosopher is precisely because like other great philosophers, he managed to discover and eliminate an extraordinary number of prejudices - because of his deep ability to philosophize, technically speaking.
86
@Independent1776: But, this isn't about the Middle Ages, it's about the Enlightenment. Wherever there were Jews practicing a ritualistic, literalistic version of their religion, there were Christians practicing something just as unenlightened. (And most secular modernists, also, with their racisms and nationalisms and political fantasies) For a philosopher to tease out some "truth" in Christianity, but to turn away from Judaism, can only show an old tribal anti-Semitism superstition hiding in intellectual form.
3
@Independent1776 You forgot Spinoza.
2
"One common thread running through the work of these philosophers is an attempt to diminish the influence of Judaism or the Jewish people on European history." While I'm not knowledgable enough about philosophy to comment on this statement, closer to our present time, the importance of Jewish people in the history of American jazz is often diminished either deliberately or through ignorance. Imagine Indian classical music without ragas. Now, imagine American jazz (focusing on Swing through Modern Jazz) without the Great American Songbook from which myriad jazz standards came, a large percentage of the composers and lyricists being Jewish. In brief, and there are many important exceptions consisting of those with (other) European, Brazilian and Latino ancestry, improvisers of genius who were predominantly African American combined with composers and lyricists of genius who were predominantly Jewish to create a new musical form. That said, Jewish improvisers of genius like Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz and Lee Konitz remain centrally important, as do blues forms originating from African Americans representing the very origins of jazz along with ragtime together with the great African American composers and lyricists (including seminal variations upon the aforementioned standards).
18
"One common thread running through the work of these philosophers is an attempt to diminish the influence of Judaism or the Jewish people on European history." While I'm not knowledgable enough about philosophy to comment on this statement, closer to our present time, the importance of Jewish people in the history of American jazz is often diminished either deliberately or through ignorance. Imagine Indian classical music without ragas. Now, imagine American jazz (focusing on Swing through Modern Jazz) without the Great American Songbook from which myriad jazz standards came, a large percentage of the composers and lyricists being Jewish. In brief, and there are many important exceptions consisting of those with (other) European, Brazilian and Latino ancestry, improvisers of genius who were predominantly African American combined with composers and lyricists who were predominantly Jewish to create a new musical form. That said, Jewish improvisers of genius like Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz and Lee Konitz remain centrally important, as do blues forms originating from African Americans representing the very origins of jazz along with ragtime together with the great African American composers and lyricists (including seminal variations upon the aforementioned standards).
5
Haven't we been here with the question of Wagner's music?
And didn't every reasonable person already decide that mankind is not capable of generating really great things so profusely that we can afford to be fastidious about some of the filth that occasionally happens to adhere to some of the greatest stuff it generates?
The things the twenty-first century finds offensive are different from the things previous centuries found offensive, but every generation has been tempted to expunge things from their (our) literary patrimony. If the nineteenth century resisted the temptation to purge Plato's dialogues of sex, the twenty-first can resist the temptation to jettison Kant for a few embarrassingly primitive speculations.
18
Your comment is a refreshing voice of reason.
2
@Woofy
Years ago I read an article on Wagner's MEISTERSINGER by a writer unfamiliar with Wagner's anti-Semitism. Interestingly he found several "Jewish" ideas in the opera, particularly the notion that a humble workman could be a great scholar, outside traditional aristocracies. People find antu-Semitic ideas in Wagner because they expect them to be there.
This is worth reading insofar as it brings up a question worth pondering. If you cast your net too wide you catch no fish; but a big fish in a little pond can hardly describe the size of a universe.
1
No, we should not stop teaching the works of any philosophers.
16
That wasn’t the question being asked. Read the article again, perhaps?
1
To me, philosophy is the discipline that studies the crafting of questions, separating “good” ones from those that are not.
Perhaps, an “introductory” course in philososophy should focus first on the principles of philosophizing, and then turn students loose to evaluate the “good” and “bad” in different theorists’ work.
They could ultimately develop a high level of thinking skills which they could use quite broadly - in their jobs, social relationships and roles as citizens.
They might find valuable notions even in the work of bigoted philosophers. And hopefully, they could separate the worthwhile from the worthless.
2
It's not just philosophers who were tainted with anti-Semitism, but many in academia and research from just about the beginnings of the university system from its theological roots all the way to the 20th century and including great parts of that century were infected with anti-Semitism in one form or another.
So should we stop reading Kant, for those still inclined to do so? Of course not. If we stopped reading and teaching all the anti-Semites, what would be left.
Should we point out that a good deal of this academic anti-Semitism served to establish the ideological roots of what would become the Holocaust. Of course we should.
I work with a classical music radio station in the background from NYC-NJ. When Wagner comes on, I keep on listening. Great music for those who enjoy the genre but I obviously am aware of the sensitivities in parts of Jewish society re Wagner.
I'm not much into Kant and never was, but as a teenager I enjoyed reading some of the plays and other works of Voltaire (in English translation). I knew then he was not big on Jews. As I wrote above, so what. Nobody was then. I still enjoyed what I was reading.
That does not mean though that I will forgive them their anti-Semitism.
57
Professor Shrage raises an interesting observation. One has to ask why Voltaire, the consummate atheist, the anti-religionist, should focus his enmity on the Jews, a group that tended toward isolationist, rather than on the Christians, a group known for its considerable energies devoted to proselytism.
13
@eclectico
Voltaire wrote"Ecrasez l'infame" about Catholicism, not Judaism, and he reserved his greatest scorn for Islam.
3
A larger issue is why is the history of philosophy still taught in the "Great Man" history mode? I thought we stopped teaching such courses built around the model X said blah blah blah, then Y came along and challenged that and said blah blah blah, to which Z responded blah blah blah.
None of these individual and their ideas arose in a vacuum.
These people were influenced by more than their elder philosophers and their own pure thoughts.
So, how were each of these philosophers influenced by their society's ideas about human origins (Rousseau and the social contract), what made a human a human (Aristotle), how are mind and body related (Descartes), how their language or nation's situation influenced them (Scottish philosophers)? When did classical philosophy make its way to Europe, and how did Arabic translations affect them? Gender, class, etc. come into play as well.
So, ideas about religion, essences, social groups are certainly part of the mix, and should be taught as inseparable from the philosophies that resulted -- how else do you think we got to the point where Christian Evangelicals for the most part support Trump, Methodists see gays as suspect, Israeli Hasidic Jews support right-wing politicians?
Professor Shrage just scratches the surface of the problems with teaching that misunderstand history.
17
What bothers me about this article, as it does with so many others I read these days, is the excessive use of passives. When the author says "Jews were regarded in the early 20th century as non-Western and therefore unfit to teach Western philosophy" and "when European Jews were reimagined as European, and therefore of the West," it is completely unclear exactly who did this regarding and reimagining (or the original imagining that was re-imagined) and how many there were. (She does mention Hocking as an example, but he was not exactly one of the most prominent philosophers in his time.)
There is a reason that many teachers of writing warn us not to use passive verbs unless really necessary. It produces very vague and even sloppy assertions because we don't know who is doing what the writer asserts "is being" done. It's true that this is just a short newspaper article, not a completely developed argument, but I would still have preferred some more specificity. As it is, I am very puzzled about just what information the writer wants to give me. I get the impression that the whole profession of philosophy is being tarred with one broad brush.
108
@Jon J
"..it is completely unclear exactly who did this regarding and reimagining (or the original imagining that was re-imagined) and how many there were."
I would imagine because it was so overwhelmingly pervasive and obvious it has become historically irrefutable so the author didn't feel the need to be more "specific" about who was doing the "regarding".
I'm not seeing a "puzzle" here, it's about as straightforward as it gets, despite your "grammatical" quibbling.
11
"We commonly assume that anti-Semitism and related attitudes are a product of ignorance and fear, or fanatical beliefs, or some other irrational force. But it is by now well known that some of the most accomplished thinkers in modern societies have defended anti-Semitic views."
(1) "We commonly assume that TODAY anti-semitism...." and are right to do so.
(2) "...the most accomplished thinkers in modern societies have defended anti-Semitic views."
Define "modern"? Hume died in 1776.
I'm hoping Professor Shrage doesn't teach advanced symbolic logic, with this kind of jesuitical two-stepping.
5
Eric Hoffer said that if you commit an injustice against a person you will come to hate that person.
I believe that Christianity and Islam stole (borrowed?) their religions from Judaism and thus have come to resent this source of their mythology.
To fault Judaism is as intellectually dishonest as praising Christianity; like arguing that Santa Claus is real but the Easter Bunny is a fiction.
To assert that Western Culture is the logical conclusion of the natural and/or God given superiority of Christianity alone is anti-intellectual and mere religious prejudice.
And to insist on including the plausibility of these various religions before starting any philosophical argument is a real problem.
29
I like the part that indicates that maybe we could just teach "Philosophy" without putting an "Eastern" or "Western" in front of it.
Thank you for this provocative article! I had not thought about this subject in that way before.
I long ago came to terms with the more generalized conundrum as it relates to music - I listen to Wagner, for heavens sake! I cannot deny that beautiful and transcendent music was made by repugnant people. And therefore, the relationship between musical and personal greatness is tangential. Not all great composers include an "Ode to Joy" in their oeuvre.
But the area of philosophy is different and much more complex mainly because it is the very realm of ideas themselves which are being talked about. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the contributions to thought that many of these people make is not based on anti-semitism even though they may have been anti-semitic. Hume's generally progressive thinking stands out in that matter.
Hiding philosophers' anti-semitism does an injustice to both Jewish people and to truth. But making it much more than a chapter probably does a disservice to their general contributions to human knowledge. As a Jew, this is a little hard for me to accept, but I do.
15
The article offers a cartoonish caricature of Hume's "Natural History of Religion." In his essay the known Skeptic (and closet atheist) directed his wit and argumentative skills against all monotheistic religions -- including Christianity, Islam, and even Zoroastrianism -- not just Judaism.
Hume argues provocatively and effectively (if not entirely sincerely) that the polytheism of the ancient pagan world was morally and spiritually at least the equal of the later monotheistic religions and actually surpassed them in several respects, including greater tolerance for other religions, less persecution of errant believers, greater overall coherence, and fewer absurdities and internal contradictions.
47
The discipline of philosophy and evidence of racism, sexism, etc. in its history?
Discussion of the latter in philosophy (racism, sexism...) cannot be adequately addressed without first realizing the former, philosophy as just a "discipline among many", namely the concept of philosophy as a discipline in a narrow, bracketed sense, is a complete misunderstanding of the project of philosophy and is a quite modern development of which the likes of Plato and Aristotle would not have understood.
Philosophy is actually the project of creating as much as possible a sage, a totally integrated artistic/scientific as well as action oriented human being, one who sums up as best as possible all that humans know and do, and this Leonardo knew and Nietzsche tried to do, and which has been lost to us by philosophy reduced to merely a "discipline" in the modern sense of the word.
Now with this understood, we can see true philosophy and not "discipline" of philosophy cares not a whit how we arrive at the sage, even if the sage has black skin, blue eyes, is a hermaphrodite, and a number of other species genes spliced in, so long as this being keeps up with the vast increase in human knowledge, can master it, and be a foundation for further human advance and promise the human future.
The problem today is nobody, no race or sex seems able to keep up with knowledge, demand, and we seem to be passing the torch to A.I. to fulfill the function of all wise and knowing being, true philosopher.
3
@Daniel12
This seems an especially profound and enlightened insight. It reminds me of when I asked santoor artist Shivkumar Sharma from India if he practiced Hinduism, and he instead described himself as a spiritual person through which a divine energy manifests in music. Similarly, vocalist Pandit Jasraj believes that God loves music more than institutionalized religion.
Technology is best understood as being in the tradition of tools, and the way to go is explorative recognition towards utilizing such tools for positive ends and solutions artistic, scientific and social.
1
Should philosophers (and the rest of us) be interested in non-Western thought? Yes, of course. Are the unenlightened views of Enlightenment thinkers a reason why? No. Odds are that non-Western thinkers were equally guilty of ethnic and religious stereotyping. Even brilliant thinkers cannot always escape the prejudices of their times. When prejudice infects philosophical arguments, we are right to reject the philosopher's conclusions. But when the argument stands on its own, we would be foolish to toss it aside because the thinker in question turned out to be just another flawed human being.
The wonky question at the heart of this article is how best to teach non-Western philosophy. Should we give up our courses on Western philosophy and replace them with all-inclusive courses on World philosophy? Or is there enough that is distinctive about Western philosophy and the thought traditions produced in other parts of the world that justifies separate courses? Professor Shrage's approach, focusing our attention as it does on the prejudices of European thinkers, does not point us toward an answer.
10
I fear that Anti-Semitism has been a constant of European (and American) life, and likely permeated every aspect of its society over the past two thousand years.
Given the narratives offered in the gospels for the crucifixion of Jesus, narratives that largely seek to exonerate Pilate and place the blame on the Jews of the period, coupled to their emphasis that Jesus must be the fulfillment of Hebrew scripture (as opposed to a more-or-less independent spiritual actor) I fear that the deeper we dig into any historic European figure, the more likely it is that we are going to encounter Anti-Semitic attitudes.
And the same is probably true as we seek sift for racist attitudes.
We are all at least partially products of our time and place - and it is doubtless useful to advise young people in advance of study of the brutalities of every era, including our own.
75
@Matthew Carnicelli I read the gospels differently. They place blame on Caiaphus and members of the Council, not the general population of Jews. They welcomed Him warmly as a popular and famous Rabbi who opposed Caiaphus. There was open rebellion against Rome in Israel and other "Messiahs", military rebels presumably, had been crucified in recent years in Jerusalem (along evidently with people accused of far lesser crimes). Barabas presumably was a threat to Rome; "Jesus" wasn't. But presumably Caiaphus and his henchmen were able to infiltrate the crowd hearing Pilate offering a choice between an innocent victim and a known enemy of Rome. Pilate was playing ball with the Jews on the Council who were trying to placate Rome, keep the rebels under control and thereby keep the Romans from defiling the Temple with images of the Emperor. Anyway, Jews did not crucify "Jesus" or the others that day. So blaming ALL Jews for this, using this reasoning, obscures the fact it is a non-biblical fiction. It therefore is and intended as a mere pretext for anti-Semitism. Jews didn't do it.
4
@Matthew Carnicelli Not if we dig into Nietzsche!
1
I think that this article is presenting European Philosophy in a very distorted way.
This statement "But it is by now well known that some of the most accomplished thinkers in modern societies have defended anti-Semitic views" is simply not true.
It doesn't mention that the quoted philosophers were actually a minority and most European philosophers (a lot of them actually Jews...) were not so prejudiced.
Therefore I think that the above article is rather shallow and strangely one sided and raises a feeling of "beware of friends...".
Nevertheless the solution to a problem of prejudice in philosophy (and anywhere) would be the teaching of independent and critical thinking.
Ironically the tools and ways to develop it are philosophical. That is the beauty of philosophy that even people that thought that Jews, non white people or even half the population i.e. women were inferior to the "christian white male" contributed inadvertently to the repertory of thinking.
When a person accustomed to critical thinking reads such prejudiced views they do not need the prejudice pointed out to them, they stand out as an obvious weakness of rationality.
35
@Anna
"This statement "But it is by now well known that some of the most accomplished thinkers in modern societies have defended anti-Semitic views" is simply not true."
My field is literature, not philosophy, but I'm afraid it true that until quite recently, many of the leading poets and novelists were anti-semitic––Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, for instance. It has been salutary for scholars to thoughtfully address that problematic dimension of their work and lives.
22
@Anna
That's not how philosophy works ...
The author of this op-ed is proving a literal quote from Kant's "Anthropology", that takes over a by then more than 1,000 years old Christian conception of Jews. And that conception is racist, as it attributes an inferior status to all Jewish individuals, just because they are Jews.
Now there are two possibilities: either you just believe that this is a correct quote, but then you HAVE to admit that Kant was anti-Semitic, and that being one of the world's greatest philosophers AND being anti-Semitic is unfortunately entirely possible, or you claim that the quote isn't an adequate translation or needs to be put into context and once you do you can't interpret it as the author here does, and then you can try to prove that Kant was not an anti-Semite (or rather, that Kantism isn't an anti-Semitic philosophy).
What you can't do, however, is what you're doing here: to not even try to verify this author's main arguments, and then nevertheless reject it as being "not true" ... . Or rather, you CAN do so, obviously (as you just did ... ;-)), but then how could anybody believe that you are "a person accustomed to critical thinking" ... ?
Any ideas?
3
'many of the leading poets and novelists were anti-semitic––Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, for instance.'
Pound was more than anti-semitic. He was a supporter of Mussolini's fascism. Eliot was more of a traditional English Gentleman anti-semite. However, two writers hardly qualify as "many". Many of the leading poets and novelists were homosexual. I think most literate people today could come up with a many more than two of them without trying too hard. Similarly, I would expect that a survey of 20th century poets and novelists would turn up not only a large number of Jews but also a large number of poets and writers who are not known as anti-semites (nobody knows what they thought - we only know what they wrote).
3
It is always dangerous to project our values and current opinions back upon thinkers of the past and hold them accountable to standards they could not have been aware of. This article does, I think, too much of that and also relies too much on secondary sources rather than the primary writings of these past thinkers. When we teach them today we tend to pass over their errors and emphasize the positive philosophical accomplishments achieved by them. With the exception of Heidegger, I really don't see that any of the mistaken views of these other past thinkers, especially Hume, Voltaire, and Kant have influenced current expressions of anti-Semitism or that they are particularly quoted by anti-Semites to justify their beliefs or that contemporary practitioners of the teaching of the history of philosophy are contributing to expressions of anti-Semitism as they are occurring today, which have their sources in contemporary political and ethnic conflicts we are all well aware of and have origins remote from the academy and the history of the Enlightenment.
155
@ Dr. Scotch
" I really don't see that any of the mistaken views of these other past thinkers, especially Hume, Voltaire, and Kant have influenced current expressions of anti-Semitism or that they are particularly quoted by anti-Semites to justify their belief ''.
You make a very important point. Especially in the US, but other countries as well, the present anti-Semites have never heard of Hume, Voltaire nor Kant, and no clue of their nationality and in which language they wrote.
14
Dr.,
I agree, and I think you're right in this context. Having said that, I also find it interesting to consider what "could have been thought " by historical figures by comparison to what was actually thought by others.
The common defense of people like Robert E. Lee (even Lincoln, in some of his statements and views), is that "this is what people thought back then." Yet, we had Garrison and Lovejoy, Sumner and John Brown, who all lived at the same time. We had the example of Frederick Douglass. There was a clear and known avenue for a broader and more thoughtful perspective, yet the Confederates rejected such wisdom entirely, and even "enlightened" people like Lincoln minimized it.
I find it hard to criticize Lincoln since he is one of my heroes, but it can be said that as great as he was, he missed the boat to some degree on the issue of the full, legitimate human and political rights of black people. It was one shortcoming, amidst many strengths. This, too, could be said of Hume and Kant, notwithstanding their other wonderful contributions. Voltaire may just, really, have meant that religious people can be a bit nutty (see, even, Israel today, as well as the Muslim and Christian worlds), and he was right. There's nothing "racial" about that.
2
@Sarah
Reminds me of the Simon and Garfunkel lyric,
‘He’s so unhip, that when I say Dylan,
He thinks I am talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was.
The man ain’t got no culture.’
1
This is an interesting article but loses its focus and I would say very much "buries the lede" towards the end. With something like 3/4 of the world's population being NOT Europe or North America, and the existence (that most Americans don't know about) of really ancient and sophisticated philisophical systems from India and China being now well known to scholars, there is no excuse for teaching "introductory" philosophy as being about Western philosophy. It's time for Western to stop being the "default" and "basic" in the undergraduate curriculum in a globalized world.
109
@Melissa Belvadi Is some of the looking to non-western sources motivated by anti-semitism? I mean, ideas from China and India are clearly not influenced by Judaism, whereas western culture is largely based on it. Was the anti-semitism of these famous philosophers real hostility or was it really about rejecting connection to roots and trying to build a new sky castle? When we pass over something and pick something else, is that always hostility? Maybe they were just original thinkers who were so early in the history of modern mental freedom that they still had to overtly declare independence: they were our dirty caveman forebears. We should learn from everyone, including them. The proportions should be based on proportions of the idea space they cover.
2
@Melissa Belvadi I ask this seriously: at what point does philosophy stop being philosophy? It’s a Greek word; there’s no direct connection (though possibly an indirect one) between what was going on in India and China and Greece when “Philosophy” became a thing. Nor did Asian thinkers classify themselves as such. And, just as importantly, it was taken in the West to be a primarily Western enterprise. This was a lie, of course, even on its own terms, not in the least because it obscured contributions from Islamic thinkers especially in the Middle Ages.
I point this out because I think most post-Hegelian Continental philosophers are largely right: as it has been traditionally understood, Philosophy reaches its culmination with Hegel - so, either you’re a Hegelian (few people explicitly are, not even hardcore Marxists but they probably come closest) or you’re just not doing Philosophy. In other words, if you’re critical of what reached its high point with Hegel, then you’re basically committed to the view that philosophy, as it was understood in the West throughout much of its history, is either dead or impossible. This is the unsurprisingly reason why continental philosophy has been better received in fields like literary theory, political science, and anthropology then philosophy proper. So again, at what point is philosophy just not philosophy, as it has been traditionally understood? And if the traditional understanding is flawed, isn’t the “discipline” itself flawed?
3
@Melissa Belvadi
I couldn't disagree more. Europe leaped ahead of the rest of the world several hundred years ago. Whether our background is European or not, we should retain our focus on western civilization.
5
Very interesting. Ms. Shrage deserves the opportunity to explain the Judaic underpinnings of Western science, colonialism, imperialism, the industrial revolution and the survival of bronze age tribalism in the modern era.
7
I don't often do this, but I want to say this as a Jew. I find this kind of argument completely specious, if not inane. It's one thing to talk about "context," but—and this is a huge misconception in the academy today and in the general culture—context doesn't determine the value of a book, a thought, or an idea. If it did, or if it could, then no thought or idea could escape or change that context. Yes, Kant was a Christian, but to reduce his philosophy to this little thought completely undoes the point of learning about anything at all. It's like saying that Pythagoras didn't believe in women's rights, so let's teach his theorem with that in mind. Yes, I'm sure from our standpoint, his views of women were abominable, but what is valuable in the history of ideas is not that they're historical, but that they're ideas—and ideas live past their time, their age, and even the prejudices of the people who developed them.
362
@Gruzia Shvili
I read this whole article thinking "Philosophy must have really run out of material if this is supposed to be interesting."
Yea, people generally had bigoted views towards others who were unlike themselves. Especially back when 99% of people did not actually associate with out groups. In some ways these philosophers really broke the mold with their ideas but in other ways they just repeated the tropes of society as it was. Thats just how history works.
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@Gruzia Shvili
Just to set the record straight, there is no basis for the claim that Pythagoras’ did not believe in women's rights. In fact, the reverse is true: There is a tradition that his his mother, wife (Theano of Croton), and daughters were part of his inner circle. His school accepted both men and women. It is believed that at least 28 women studied at the school during the lifetime of the master and his wife. (The total number of students was about 300.)
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@Dedalus Thanks for the historical information re Pythagoras. I don't think it changes my point, which is that context—to speak in a specific philosophical jargon—is not "determinate." Indeed, as Prof. Schrage is aware, the problem of determination is a huge question in the development of modern philosophy. The historical practices that have become entrenched in the American academy fail to acknowledge and contend with it. But it will probably help her tenure case, if she has one, because that's what is expected nowadays. The humanities have become "interdisciplinary" in many ways, but they're hyper-disciplined in the way that everything is referred to historical categories that are usually extremely arbitrary. Does Prof. Schrage believe that Kant's views about Judaism shouldn't have influenced Moses Mendelssohn?
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Since articles like these provide fuel for racist extremists always quick to adopt and use any mainstream meme which ostensibly might support their vile views, the decision to publish is questionable.
This isn't to say that that they should be suppressed. The study of a particular philosopher could be prefaced with a warning. However that would predispose the student to assess the content with a jaundiced view, particularly if he or she thought highly of the professor.
There is of course no good answer to the conundrum. Perhaps a mandatory course in the general history of philosophical bias might enlighten without having as much impact on the objectivity with which students, hopefully, approach their studies.
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@Sam
Rule of deduction: if the premise is false, the content is flawed.
Rule of induction: determine probability, not truth.
Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Nietzsche et al are important figures in the history of philosophy, and are not very important to the practice of it.
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@Sam Maybe actually studying Jewish philosophy (along with Buddhist, Mohammedan, Hindu, Confucian etc) together with the classic western philosophy would help The "philosophical bias" you are so fearful is actually already there in philosophy. There is nothing wrong with pointing it out -- in fact it deepens study and understanding. Of course, one should understand that many of our racist beliefs are reinforced and handed down from philosophical school to school because they are not confronted Look at the structural racism in our society to understand why this is so. Or, read the book "Anti-Judaism" by Prof R Nirenberg UChicago to look at how anti-semitism survives in western thought as this author is pointing out. Do this before you dismiss her points out of hand
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Things that make you go "Hmm."
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I’ve studied Kant in some detail, as well as being acquainted with Hume and Voltaire, and never heard about their bigoted sides until I read Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray, which brings up exactly these issues. It’s a bit of a wild-eyed rant, but worth reading.
Perhaps the time is ripe to recognize the profound limits of these most influential thinkers, and even the damage they have done to us all.
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@Alex K
Voltaire was not really in the same ballpark philosophically as Kant and Hume. Voltaire was a political philosopher and actually a lot more than just a philosopher. This is the problem with this senseless article. It’s like throwing Bach and Mick Jagger into the same pot, and arriving at some far flung objection to ‘Music’ and the teaching of, because of Jagger’s philandering or Bach’s Christianity.
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We should examine and discuss these thinker's failings but respect their accomplishments. We are all products of our times and cultures, and how we view the ethical and moral state of those times and cultures will be forever revisited. Two hundred years from now humanity will look back at the many intellectual and moral failures of our times and wonder, "What were they thinking?"
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@Larry Bennett I am not a student of philosophy and therefore may not understand completely the impact of this article. It seems, however, that a philosopher's work must depend on the logical bases for his conclusions. If those bases are fallacious, then the conclusions must be rejected. We would not be degrading the accomplishments of these thinkers so much as disproving the outcome of their thinking. For example, an antisemitic painter's works would still have value e.g. Renoir. But a philosopher's work depends on the logical progression of thought. If his work is based on false notions, that progression cannot be logical and must be reassessed.
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@Mark Cohn My conclusion is that the reason moral/ethical philosophy never ends is because it all is based on the false premise that it is logical. The true premise is morality is biological. Morality is tribal and self justification that effectively promotes ones own offspring over the others.
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@Mark Cohn. Perhaps what you say might be true if the base for their arguments about reality in any way refers back to Judaism vis a vis Christianity’s view. However, I don’t recall that most of the work of these philosophers incorporates anti-semitism as even part of their arguments for anything.
A better case can be made that the “universal” Catholic Church in its 2,000 year battle for the hearts and minds of Western man has done far more damage in generating hatred and underlying suspicion towards Jews (and other “out groups”) than any or all of these philosophers put together.
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Just finished Hume in my classroom. Will begin Kant, today. This article has enlightened how I understand Western philosophy, and I look forward to sharing it with my students. Thank you, Professor Shrage.
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@Corell
Prof. Shrage's evaluations of Hume, Voltaire and Kant are based entirely on secondary sources.
A good student project would be to read the primary sources and to look for confirmation or contradiction of Shrage's allegations of racism and anti-semitism.
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And, religion. Unfortunately, thinking occurs existentially and religion of the moment predominated everything then and now. Again, the base writing regarding existence seeded everything else anyone wrote or thought about thereafter. Hume, was less handicapped because he was dismissive of religion and was by writing and reports a non-believer. Most of his contemporaries believed that he was a closet 'believer' throughout his life. These thinker were competitive and subject to jealousy and notoriety. Technically speaking, it was either logical or not (arguments). When teaching philosophy one only needs to test everything logically and uncover the flaws of humanity in acts and writings. Harmful prejudices must be exposed and all bias breaks down upon scholarly analysis and review.
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Walter Kaufmann, Princeton's dinstinguished Nietzsche scholar, had a Jewish background. I was fortunate to have him supervise my senior thesis on Nietzsche and Freud. Philosophy is a natural field for a people who have a proud tradition of intellectual inquiry in Talmudic studies, unfettered by the sort of deductive thinking based on unquestioned premises that characterized centuries of Christian theology.
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@Richard Waugaman
"Philosophy is a natural field for a people who have a proud tradition of intellectual inquiry in Talmudic studies, unfettered by the sort of deductive thinking based on unquestioned premises that characterized centuries of Christian theology."
This is a fascinating comment. I'm at a loss to understand it and would be grateful if you elucidated it.
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@Mostly Rational
Pretty sure Dr. Waugaman is referring to the centuries of scholasticism that characterized Christian philosophy between Augustine and Descartes, which in Aquinas's time congealed into a very formalized deductive method. In contrast, Judaic thought has been characterized by more hermeneutics and textual interpretation. Not unlike the differences between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy in the last century.
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Thank you – well said. Similarly, centuries of western intellectual history were distorted by an unquestioning adherence to the writings of Aristotle. It was only in the Renaissance that inductive reasoning was introduced by Francis Bacon. We still need to follow inductive methodology in order to overcome our prejudices and circular reasoning. The authorship of Shakespeare’s works is a major case in point, with traditionalists refusing to question their premise about who the author was.
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History, philosophy, English, and even science must be taught within their context. We cannot disregard information that has value simply because the individuals' views would be deemed abhorrent today. But, when teaching these subjects it is incumbent upon teachers and professors to expose the prejudices and the harm created by these individuals. We only grow when we have full discussions and engage in open conversations and debates- even if the ultimate decision is to complete reject the ideas proposed.
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@BMD
I agree with BMD's thoughts about context. For many years, I taught an upper-level undergraduate course called "Women in Western Political Thought." We focused on the theorists' views of women and family -- with male control of wives and children typically (as with Locke) viewed as the essential bulwark of state and society. Most of my students had already taken the intro to Western Political Thought. However, in that survey, they had never been assigned the chapters on women and family, and were continually shocked to discover what these theorists thought about women. The chapters on women and family were treated as if irrelevant -- ignored -- when in fact, they are anything but irrelevant in understanding the theorists' assumptions about state and society. We professors too often pick and choose what to emphasize in the theorists we admire.
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@BMD
Exactly what was the "harm created by these individuals"? It sounds to me that everybody ignored this nonsense about "Adamites" and "pre-Adamites" and focused on their other, valuable ideas.
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Thank you, Professor Shrage, for this welcome bit of sunlight and fresh air, putting these scions of Western philosophy in perspective. Indeed, we cannot fully appreciate these works without understanding the context in which they evolved.
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@DK With respect: icons.
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