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Roy Strong caused some sensation when he was quoted as saying: ‘”I couldn’t believe it when some woman on the radio said Nelson’s Column ought to be demolished because he believed in slavery. Well, listen, dear, that was about 1800. Once you start rewriting history on that scale, there won’t be a statue or a historic house standing. It’s ridiculous. The past is the past. You can’t rewrite history.”(Strong & Freeman, 2017) I am reminded of the quotation from…

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There is a great deal of confusion over class and race. This year of BLM has also led to renewed focus on the theoretical question of ‘race’ and the rising inequalities also led to revival of interest in Marxism. This resurgence of interest in Marxism has also led to a revival of interest in the relation between class and race. At some point a heavily researched article will emerge in the Journal on this topic but the matter is…

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We have a possible reconciliation. Leigh Jenko has now distanced herself from  the apparent separation of Chinese and Western philosophy in terms of ‘rational’ and non-rational’. She wrote to me on 23 November: ‘Regarding reason/rationality, I am not keen on using such terms,………., so I think we are in agreement here. ‘ Bravo.

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This is a discreet (Note 1) follow up: Prof Leigh Jenco let me know that she held to  a  three part distinction: rational, non-rational and irrational. Western philosophy is rational, while Chinese philosophy is non-rational. Frankly this concept of ‘non-rational’ seems merely a polite version of ‘irrational’. In all my life I have never heard of non-rational thinking. My response to her was: “I think you will find it untenable to maintain  a distinction between rational and non rational…

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Leigh Jenco seeks to acclimatize  classic Chinese thought to Western philosophy in her talk at Aristotelian Society (16 Nov 20). Her first gambit is to place Chinese history into a similar historiography as the West and to make it share an ‘early modernity’. There is this underlying wish to help accommodate and rehabilitate China by showing how similar it is to the West. This is pretty violent in creating an imperial China when China shares more with Ancient Egypt…

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In our earlier piece 1 we suggested the police killings of Black men in the US constituted a practice of human sacrifice. Joseph Watts of Max Planck Institute has a contribution in Nature reported in The Atlantic  to our discussion on  human sacrifice: “Social elites used human sacrifice as a tool to instill fear and show their power,” Joseph Watts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, says. “As far as tools…

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In an earlier post we mentioned the hypocrisy of French intellectuals in allowing Macron to proclaim the  absolute right of Freedom of Speech. Actually France has laws against hate speech and laws against holocaust denials. This means that Macron had at his hands the means to ban the offensive cartoons. It also means that all this talk about fundamental French values was pure hocum. France did not feel there was a right to deny the Nazi holocaust or deny…

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Larry Krasner has an excellent pedigree and must be puzzled as to what he is dealing with. Why does this behavior keep repeating itself even on camera? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-man-shot-dead-police-philadelphia-sparking-heated-protests-n1244888 One of the issues around police violence and lynching is to understand the phenomenon.  What was the purpose for lynching and why did  certain people feel that it was  a valuable activity. To argue that it was racism is a circular argument revealing nothing, explaining nothing. In the Philadelpha link we…

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France and European intellectuals have finally shown their deep hypocrisy. On the one hand Macron is declaring that the right to free speech to be absolute. Yet in the next breath he imposes a draconian attack on Islamism with significant focus on social media. Opinions and expressions on social media are used as evidence of dangerous tendencies. Some words are dangerous but others are immune? There is a traditional  argument that free speech has to be protected  and the…

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