Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

Racism And Biopower, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

While ignorance, or at least a lack of clear and distinct experience, does not seem to have stopped our predecessors from philosophizing about all manner of things from matter to immortal souls, in the latter half of the twentieth century North American philosophers became increasingly timid about advancing propositions based primarily not on logic informed by material evidence but on intuition, creative imagination, and passionate desire. By the 1960s our generation's teachers and mentors, perhaps battered by the McCarthy years or humbled by the dazzling successes of their colleagues in the "hard" sciences, had redrawn the disciplinary boundaries tightly enough …