Sunday, January 8, 2017

You Broke It, not BREXIT

And I thought the US Academy was in a state of collapse. But the Telegraph depicts the UK Universities as follows:

But students at a prestigious London university are demanding that figures such as Plato, Descartes and Immanuel Kant should be largely dropped from the curriculum because they are white. School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)'s student union is insisting that when studying philosophy “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia.

The article continues:

Sir Roger Scruton, the philosopher, said the demands suggest “ignorance”. “You can't rule out a whole area of intellectual endeavour without having investigated it and clearly they haven't investigated what they mean by white philosophy,” he told The Mail on Sunday. “If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it.'

Knowing Scrunton, and he is brilliant, he has more than a point. The irony is that these individuals led to the very creation of a civil society.