Sunday, November 7, 2010

The weird thing about Neven Sesardic's ariticle

After I recommended it to jewamongyou, I reread  Neven Sesardic's excellent article "Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept"  and there is something weird the acknowledgements.  Sesardic article gives a great overview and critique of the philosophical discussion of the "race" concept claiming that current philosophers of science have ignored a great deal of scientific of evidence to argue away the biological reality of race.  The article is accessible to non-philosophers like myself and the references alone make it worth the effort.   I missed the acknowledgement where Sesardic thanks Alex Rosenberg the chairman of the Duke Philosophy department.  Rosenberg is also a signer of the liberal Group of 88  statement on the Duke Lacrosse unpleasantness.  So, a big shot liberal  professor of the humanities gave helpful comments on a paper that discusses  Lewontin's fallacy and favorably references Jensen and Rushton.   That is weird. 

6 comments:

jewamongyou said...

Weird indeed! And I'm indebted to you for making me aware of that article. I'm working on an abridged edition of the article so that I can, hopefully, speak it into youtube - since so many people refuse to read these days.

Statsquatch said...

Sounds great. I liked the "Apes and Angels" video.

IHTG said...

You wrote on AltRight:

A race realist neocon is a strange creature indeed.

But that's not true at all. Read up on the people who were behind The Bell Curve.

Statsquatch said...

Paul Gottfried compared commentaries support of Murray with the Medici's support of great artists and sculptors: it was nice but it never influenced their policies or ideology.

jlovborg said...

This does not, of course, mean that Rosenberg agrees with Sesardic, although it's pretty, well, scholarly of Rosenberg to comment on such a paper at all. In his article "Nature, nurture, and politics", Sesardic thanks Rosenberg as well:

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Alex Rosenberg, Elliott Sober, Omri Tal, and Dan Wikler for useful comments on the first draft. It should not be assumed, however, that any of them agrees with my views.

Rosenberg seems to have written a book chapter about the political consequences of HBD.

Statsquatch said...

jlovborg,

Thanks for the link. Your comment got caught in the spam folder. I just do not understand why Rosenberg would not ignore or rebut a paper like that.