Templeton Prize winner spouts more nonsense in Scientific American

March 22, 2019 • 10:15 am

The other day, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth College won the £1 million Templeton Prize for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” At the time I used his quotes reported by the media to show that, while Gleiser may be a good physicist, he’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to talking about atheism and “the limits of science.”

This is all confirmed in a new Scientific American interview with Gleiser conducted by Lee Billings, an associate editor who writes about cosmology and physics. Read on, but don’t waste a lot of time:

It’s the usual pap espoused by scientists who are also “spiritual” in the way Templeton likes: touting the limitations of science, saying there are other ways to answer the Big Questions, and, especially, dissing atheism.

One of the most disingenuous parts of the interview, and a sure sign of thoughtless accommodationism, is the call for “humility.” Of course, that call applies only to atheists and scientists, not to believers:

[Billings] Right. So which aspect of your work do you think is most relevant to the Templeton Foundation’s spiritual aims?

[Gleiser] Probably my belief in humility. I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at the way science works, you’ll see that yes, it is wonderful — magnificent! — but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don’t know. So that’s one answer to your question. And that has nothing to do with organized religion, obviously, but it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic.

It always sounds good to tout “humility”, doesn’t it? The thing is, scientists are already humble, because we’re forced to be. Yes, there are arrogant scientists (Lynn Margulis comes to mind), but as far as practicing science goes, you’re always looking over your shoulder asking “What if I’m wrong?” “How can I make sure that there are no flaws in my work that others might see?” You don’t become famous by being loud (although sometimes that helps); you become famous by being right. And the more arrogant you are, the more likely others are to replicate your work.

Do you know this famous quote by Thomas Henry Huxley?

“Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing.”

Gleiser’s double standard for humility becomes clear when he goes after atheism but doesn’t go after believers:

Why are you against atheism?

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation. It’s not just me; it’s also my colleague the astrophysicist Adam Frank, and a bunch of others, talking more and more about the relation between science and spirituality.

I’ve already discussed this cockeyed view.  The idea that atheism is “belief in nonbelief” is a Deepity, for it sounds profound but upon examination proves shallow and, indeed, stupid. Atheists don’t “believe in nonbelief”: they reject acceptance of gods because there is no evidence for gods. That’s all there is to it, and, contra Gleiser, it’s absolutely consistent with the scientific method. In fact, the refusal to accept “truths” when there’s no evidence for them is the hallmark science—although there is no formal “scientific method.”

In contrast, Gleiser’s own agnosticism is simply a chickenshit way to avoid conclusions that he’d draw in any other area of science. If one posits that there are aliens living on Mars, but we find no evidence of them after repeated scans of the planet, and no signs of life from sending up biological probes, then you’re being unscientific. As Vic Stegner used to say, “The absence of evidence is evidence of absence—if that evidence should be there.”

As I wrote in Faith Versus Fact:

In science, if there should be evidence for a phenomenon but that evidence is consistently missing, one is justified in concluding that the phenomenon doesn’t exist. Examples are the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, as well as paranormal phenomena like ESP or telekinesis. Seeking evidence for such things, the skeptics always come up dry. It is the same with God, though theologians will object to comparing God to Bigfoot. The philosopher Delos McKown had a more parsimonious answer for God’s absence: “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

And I said this after examining Barbara Forrest’s convincing argument that the success of methodological naturalism implies an underlying philosophy of philosophical naturalism (i.e., “there are no gods”):

Although Forrest wrongly implies that science can’t examine the supernatural, her overall argument makes sense. If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they’re talking about God.

Gleiser’s agnosticism is of the second variety.

It’s quite curious, but understandable, that while Gleiser says that “I have no evidence for God or any kind of god,” he still says he’s an agnostic, and at the same time goes after atheists while keeping his mitts off of religionists. After all, it is the religionists who believe in stuff without any evidence, and Gleiser implicitly admits that. So why does he call out atheists but not believers? The answer is one word: Templeton.

Finally, what are the limits of science? Clearly they involve things that science can’t address because they involve issues not resolvable by empirical examination. Those issues are fewer than we think (for instance, science might be able to provide answer to “why do we find some things beautiful and other things repulsive?”), but we already know that science can’t fully resolve issues of subjective preference—like moral questions. If you decide what your moral preferences are (e.g., “it is best to maximize well being”), then you can approach the question empirically: what actions do maximize well being? But if that’s not your goal, and you have some other subjective morality (e.g., “abortion is immoral because it involves murder”), then science can’t answer that. (I do point out, though, that if the anti-abortion argument rests on the existence of a unique soul in humans, science might be able to tackle that.

I know very few scientists who would say that science can answer every question. It can’t, and sometimes we need clear-thinking input from philosophers and those trained to think logically. So when Gleiser emits the following bromides, I’ll just note that secular humanism, with no need for woo or “spirituality”, would arrive at the same conclusion:

. . . But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment, only because earlier you referred to the value of humility in science. Some would say now is not the time to be humble, given the rising tide of active, open hostility to science and objectivity around the globe. How would you respond to that?

This is of course something people have already told me: “Are you really sure you want to be saying these things?” And my answer is yes, absolutely. There is a difference between “science” and what we can call “scientism,” which is the notion that science can solve all problems. To a large extent, it is not science but rather how humanity has used science that has put us in our present difficulties. Because most people, in general, have no awareness of what science can and cannot do. So they misuse it, and they do not think about science in a more pluralistic way. So, okay, you’re going to develop a self-driving car? Good! But how will that car handle hard choices, like whether to prioritize the lives of its occupants or the lives of pedestrian bystanders? Is it going to just be the technologist from Google who decides? Let us hope not! You have to talk to philosophers, you have to talk to ethicists. And to not understand that, to say that science has all the answers, to me is just nonsense. We cannot presume that we are going to solve all the problems of the world using a strict scientific approach. It will not be the case, and it hasn’t ever been the case, because the world is too complex, and science has methodological powers as well as methodological limitations.

How you prioritize things like the value of lives versus the value of cars can be largely a subjective weighing of issues, but even then science can help resolve these questions once you specify an desirable trade-off between dollars and lives or dollars and convenience.  So no, science can’t by itself solve “all the problems of the world”. But it’s a damn sight better than religion in solving the problems of the world! Again, it’s understandable that Gleiser directs his ire at science and not religion. Why not indict Catholicism for saying it not only didn’t help solve the AIDS crisis, but made it worse? As Rebecca Goldstein told me, “Moral philosophy is a throughly secular enterprise.”

Gleiser is a Templeton flack, and I have nothing but contempt for his disingenuous attacks on atheism and science. Well, if he’s not disingenuous, he’s a very sloppy thinker.

Finally, why did Scientific American publish this article? The magazine is supposed to be about science, not science and woo. And the article is misleading and irrelevant, appealing only to believers who want to think their faith is consistent with science.

Here’s a photo of Gleiser from Australia’s Eternity News, which also had the headline below his photo:


h/t: Dave

HuffPost pushes erotic astrology

March 22, 2019 • 8:40 am

What is it with the Leftist media now? The other day Greg pointed out how the New York Times is growing soft on astrology (see here and here), dramatically increasing the number of columns it’s published on the topic, with almost all of those columns being either neutral or slightly positive.

Now HuffPost has this (click on screenshot to read the nonsense). It’s written by the site’s romance, sex, and relationship columnist.

Oy!  Some excerpts:

“Although we may no longer treat illness through medical astrology, it provides invaluable insight into each of the 12 zodiac signs’ physicality ― and yep, how they like to get down,” Kelly said.

For the fun of it, we spoke to Kelly [“Aliza Kelly, Allure’s resident astrologer and the host of the podcast Stars Like Us.”] and fellow astrologer Lisa Stardust to find out more about each sign’s supposed erogenous zone. Read on to see if yours matches your turn-ons.

[Note: Always ask your partner where they like to be touched before making assumptions about their preferences based on internet listicles!]

I love the Woke admonition to always get affirmative consent before using astrology!

Here’s my “sign zones”, which isn’t accurate at all:

It turns out that HuffPost has a daily astrology column and a lot of articles about how to shop/behave/have sex/etc. based on your zodiac sign:

Head here for more astrology content and here to read your daily horoscope.

I am curious whether a weakness for astrology is part of the Woke Left’s playbook, or if it spans Right and Left. I don’t much care: astrology is not just nonsense, but marginally harmful nonsense, and there’s no caveat in this article that this is mere fantasy.

Ceiling Cat help me, I couldn’t resist leaving a comment based on the article’s subtitle. You can too!

Duck match: is it Honey?

March 22, 2019 • 7:33 am

I’ve been feeding the newly-arrived ducks at Botany Pond: the mallards have now been here two days.  They are definitely skittish and didn’t come to my whistle, which was one indication that these were not Honey and James. But when I step back from the pond, they do eat copiously, and they look to be in good shape (see below).

The female has started nesting on the third floor of the adjacent building, which means that if she doesn’t abandon her nest, the ducklings will have to drop three stories on the day they hatch (this is normal and doesn’t hurt them). Hatching is expected in about a month.

Anna went to the pond yesterday and, after a long-distance inspection, she wasn’t so sure that the hen wasn’t Honey. So I’ll ask readers to weigh in pending better pictures of her beak markings. It does seem clear from the photos, though, that the drake isn’t James. He’s still a big and handsome boy, though.

They were tamer yesterday than when they arrived on Wednesday, and came out of the water to eat my duck chow (I still have about 15 pounds) on the grass:

A video of them nomming duck food on the grass. They look pretty healthy.

Here is the hen with shots of the left and right side of her bill. Below I’ve put closeup R and L shots of Honey’s bill from last year and this year. (The full-duck photos are a bit out of focus because it was dark and shutter speed was low.)

And here are shots of Honey’s bill from last year. At first I thought the new hen didn’t match the patterns at all (they do change from year to year), but now I’m not so sure. The black triangle on the right bill, where the bill meets the head, used to be my diagnostic trait. And it seems to be present in the new duck, as does the pattern of dark dots on the left side.  But of course I have confirmation bias, so I want it to be her.

Last year, right side:

This year’s hen, right side, enlarged (remember, the patterns change so perfect matches aren’t expected):

Last year, left side:

Last year’s bill, left side, enlarged;

This year’s hen, left side, enlarged:

What say you? Do you think it’s her?

Here’s the lovely drake, who will need a name (suggest one, please). He’s clearly not James, as the color of his breast is completely different.

New drake:

New Drake, shot #2:

New drake, shot #3:

James Pond from last year. Sadly, he’s apparently not the same drake as the new one has a much lighter breast. I guess the romance fizzled down on the bayou:

Is it her? Is it her? Remember, she’s more skittish than she was last year, and didn’t recognize my whistle.

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 22, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday, March 22, 2019, and the second real day of Spring. And ducks are here! I am thinking that the hen might be Honey, but I’ll show the bill pictures later.

Tomorrow I’m off for Belgium and Amsterdam, so posting will be very light for two weeks or so. It’s World Water Day on Foodimentary, and they recommend you drink 8 cups of water per day. I am very bad about that, and probably drink about one. See also here for the Wikipedia entry.

On this day in 1622, the Jamestown massacre took place, with Algonquin Indians killing 347 English settlers: 1/3 of the colony’s population. This was in retaliation for the colonists’ appropriation of lands to grow tobacco. On March 22, 1765, the British parliament passed the Stamp Act that introduces a tax on all printed material in the American colonies (playing cards, newspapers, etc.), which had to carry a revenue stamp. This is one hated feature that led to the Revolution.  On this day in 1872, Illinois became the first state to require gender equality in the workplace. 1872!

Moving on, it was on March 22, 1960, that Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes got the first patent for a laser. Shawlow got the Nobel Prize in 1981, Townes in 1964. On that very same day in 1960, in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, the United States Supreme Court ruled that unmarried people had the right to possess contraceptives. I was only 11 then, so this was not a concern for me.  On this day in 1978, Karl Wallenda of The Flying Wallendas fell off a tightrope stretched between two hotels in Puerto Rico. There was no net, so he plunged to his death. You can see the video here (warning, it’s a bit disturbing, though there’s no gore). On March 22, 2016, three suicide bombers set off explosives at the Brussels airport and a metro station, killing 32 and injuring 316. Three of the five perpetrators died in the bombings, the other two were arrested.  Finally, it was on this day two years ago that there was a terrorist attack in London near the Houses of Parliament. Four people were killed and at least 20 injured.

Notables born on this day include Adam Sedgwick (1785), Robert Millikan (1868, Nobel Laureate), Chico Marx (1887), Karl Malden (1912), Werner Klemperer (1920), Marcel Marceau (1923), Pat Robertson and Stephen Sondheim (both 1930), Lena Olin (1955), and Reese “Don’t You Know Who I Am?” Witherspoon (1976).

Those who bought it on March 22 were few; they include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832), and Karl Wallenda (1978, see above).

By the way, Carl Reiner turned 97 two days ago and an article on Fox describes how he celebrated:

“By staying alive!” the comedian recently told Closer Weekly. “Today, I woke up thinking about a dish I haven’t eaten in a long time. We used to have a house in the south of France, and the first day we arrived we always had ‘lapin a la cocotte,’ rabbit in burnt butter sauce. I’m going to celebrate by having that!”

That’s a man after my own heart. I hope he had a good wine with it.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili prescribes a sort of feline Turing Test—or should we call it the Purring Test?

Hili: Artificial intelligence may purr but it will not be a cat.
A: But it can be quite charming.
Hili: You must be joking.
In Polish:
Hili: Sztuczna inteligencja może mruczeć, ale kotem nie będzie.
Ja: Może mieć jednak sporo wdzięku.
Hili: Chyba żartujesz.

From Facebook, created by Leigh Rubin of “Rubes“:

From reader Barry. This Christian textbook entry about evolution has one lie after another.  The “principles of Darwin’s general philosophy” are generally true (except I don’t think Darwin was firm on #2), but this screed leaves out a lot of other principles, like splitting of lineages and the creation of “designoid” features of organisms by natural selection.

From reader Nilou. I did this experiment and got the headline below the tweet; readers should try this themselves and weigh in below:

What I got:

Tweets from Matthew; I’ll show all four:

Matthew wondered why anybody would do this, and my response was, “To attract emus, of course!”

Which one are you? I’m right there next to “Atheist”.

Tweets from Grania. First, a lovely waterscape:

Good God! I’m never giving a seminar in Iceland. From the excellent Irish comedian Dara “get in the fooking sack” Ó Briain:

 

The Internet plumbs new depths: anti-vaxers harass parents who lose children

March 21, 2019 • 2:00 pm

This article from CNN (click on screenshot below) shows about the worst Internet behavior I’ve seen—behavior that makes the Young Adult Fiction Police look like saints. Read and weep copiously:

What happens here is that parents who lose children from disease, and mourn for them online, are viciously attacked on social media by antivaxers. The reasons are various, but none come from those who favor vaccines. Parents are either accused of killing their children with vaccines, of spreading the “false gospel” of vaccination, or are simply attacked when, if their child died because he/she couldn’t be vaccinated, they campaign for other children to be vaccinated. Those campaigns really get the trolls exercised. Here are a few examples:

On May 6, 2016, Promoli put her toddlers Jude and his twin brother Thomas, down for an afternoon nap in their home. Jude had a low-grade fever, but he was laughing and singing when he went down for his nap.

When his mother went to check on him two hours later, he was dead. Promoli said the next few weeks were “a living hell.”

“Having to go in and plan a funeral and find the ability somehow to even take steps to walk into a funeral home, to make plans and decide whether to bury or cremate your child — it was just all so horrifying,” she said.

When an autopsy came back showing Jude had died of the flu, Promoli started her flu prevention campaign.

That’s when the online attacks began.

Some anti-vaxers told her she’d murdered Jude and made up a story about the flu to cover up her crime. Others said vaccines had killed her son. Some called her the c-word.

The worst ones — the ones that would sometimes make her cry — were the posts that said she was advocating for flu shots so that other children would die from the shots and their parents would be miserable like she was.

“The first time it made me feel really sick because I couldn’t fathom how anybody could even come up with such a terrible claim,” Promoli said. “It caught me off guard in its cruelty. What kind of a person does this?”

Want more?

Serese Marotta lost her 5-year-old son, Joseph, to the flu in 2009, and is now chief operating officer of Families Fighting Flu, a group that encourages flu awareness and prevention, including vaccination.
In 2017, she posted a video on the eighth anniversary of her son’s death to reinforce the importance of getting the flu vaccine.
“SLUT,” one person commented. “PHARMA WHORE.”
“May you rot in hell for all the damages you do!” a Facebook user wrote on another one of her posts.
She says a Facebook user in Australia sent her a death threat”She called me a lot of names I won’t repeat and used the go-to conspiracy theories about government and big pharma, and I responded, ‘I lost a child,’ and questioned where she was coming from, and she continued to attack me,” said Marotta, who lives in Syracuse, New York.
viz.:

One more:

Grieving mothers aren’t the only targets of anti-vaxer abuse.

Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Hastings School of Law, has received countless vile messages, and as with the mothers, many of the messages are gender-oriented. Over the years, she’s become pretty blasé about it.

“‘Whore’ is pretty normal,” said Reiss, a pro-vaccine advocate who has written extensively about vaccines. “I’ve also been called a [c**t].”

Sometimes Reiss, who is Jewish, receives comments that mention the Holocaust.

One Facebook user made a meme with a photo of her father with “Proud Supporter of the Vaccine Holocaust.” Reiss says her father has nothing to do with vaccines.

Another meme shows a photo of Reiss holding her infant son and it says that Reiss is “FORCE-injecting” her baby with vaccines.Below the photo is written: “Because one holocaust wasn’t enough.”

There are threats on the lives of pro-vaccination doctors like Paul Offit, messages far more hateful than anything I’ve ever gotten. I don’t even want to repeat them here, but you can see them in the article.

Facebook is trying to moderate this debate, and I heard on the news that although they’re not going to ban anti-vaxers, they will “moderate” discussion. I am conflicted about banning, as these morons are urging actions that can cause widespread and near-immediate harm; but on balance I think they should be allowed to speak, for that sparks a debate in which their claims can be refuted. (Harassment of individuals, and the use of threats, however, are not protected speech and can be prosecuted.)  Facebook did say they would give anti-vaxer comments a lower profile on their pages, which I guess is a decent solution. They will, however, try to prevent targeting of individuals like those above.

Finally, there’s some interesting material about “spies” who infiltrate anti-vaxer groups like Stop Mandatory Vaccination and find out that, despite the denials of that group’s officials, the members urge each other to harass parents whose children have died.

This is one reason why I don’t like anonymity on the Internet. Even if we don’t ban anti-vaxer discussions, at least the people involved should be required to give their real names, and thus held accountable for their statements. And their actions are disgusting: this onslaught of harassment of grieving parents is the lowest to which our species can sink. All we can do is educate ourselves about the benefits of vaccination and keep arguing.

The CNN article ends on a sad note: this made me tear up a bit:

When she sees anti-vaxers talking about parents in their closed groups, [Erin] Costello, the online pro-vaccine spy, gets in touch with those parents to warn them they may be getting nasty messages from the anti-vaxers.

When Costello reached out to the mother in the Midwest, she explained why she was contacting her.

“I know you’re likely getting many horrible messages on Facebook right now,” Costello wrote to the mother. “Children such as [yours] are the reason why I do my part to fight for overwhelming acceptance of vaccines as well as fight against the lies and misinformation that are recklessly spread around against vaccines.”

The mother wrote back.

“I appreciate the strong role you take in helping protect families like mine,” she said.

After hundreds of Facebook comments from anti-vaxers, the mother turned off comments on her page, and deleted many of the ones she received.

Some are still in her head, though. She weeps as she remembers the one that was hardest to read.

“The ones that said this was a fake story. That he wasn’t real. That my child didn’t exist,” she said. “Because when your child dies, that’s the biggest fear — that he will be forgotten.”

That’s how low these jerks will sink.

 

h/t: Diane G.

How do we deal with anti-Semitic philosophers of past centuries?

March 21, 2019 • 11:45 am

Here is a strange but timely article from the New York Times‘s philosophy column, “The Stone.” Laurie Shrage, a professor of philosophy at Florida International University, asks how we should deal with the palpable anti-Semitism of early philosophers. But in the course of her lucubrations, she conflates four distinct questions. Read the piece by clicking on the screenshot:

Here are the four questions conflated in the article which purports to deal with a simple yes or no question: “Should we continue to teach thinkers like Kant, Voltaire, and Hume without mention of the harmful prejudices they helped legitimize?

1.) Do we mention the anti-Semitism of European philosophers as part of their character when we teach their work?

2.) Do we investigate and teach how we think their anti-Semitism permeated their work—if it did?

3.) Do we teach philosophers outside the Western “canon”—people like Maimonides, Philo, or Confucius, rather than adhere to a philosophical “image of the West as racist thinkers have fashioned it?”

And there’s an unspoken question:

4.) Should we marginalize or even not teach the work of Western philosophers who were anti-Semites?

Shrage also spends a bit of time indicting the teaching of philosophy because, in the last hundred years, Jews weren’t hired to teach philosophy because they weren’t really regarded as “Western”. Well, that problem no longer exists, so I’m not sure what this potted history reveals. It certainly sheds no light on the questions above.

My answers are as follows:

1.) We should mention the anti-Semitism of ancient philosophers only insofar as it affected or informed their philosophy. After all, almost everyone in Europe before the 19th century, including (or maybe especially) educated folk, were not only anti-Semitic, but racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. Our change in morality should certainly be studied in history or sociology classes, but something sticks in my craw when people demand that long-dead people who lived in bigoted milieu be constantly indicted for bigotry. I don’t mention Darwin’s own bigotry in my evolution class (he was an abolitionist but also denigrated black people), but I would if I were teaching the parts of his work in which he speculated about racial hierarchies.

2.) As for Kant, Hume, and Voltaire, I’m not sure how much of the philosophy taught as “theirs” is affected by bigotry. That would be up to individual teachers. It’s clear from what Shrage said that these people did publish anti-Semitic stuff, but it’s not clear to me that this is the stuff taught in philosophy classes.

3.) Of course we should teach non-Western philosophers; I’m sure there is a lot of good thought there that deserves airing. Because most academic philosophers are taught the Western canon, and teach it themselves, this may require “non-Western philosophy” courses, but I’m all in favor of that.

As for religious philosophers, I’m a bit more dubious. How much real philosophy is there in religious philosophy, given that lots of it involves assuming gods for which there is no evidence? Do we really want to ask why God would permit the existence of evil if we don’t think there’s a god? This is why, when founding the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson stipulated that it would have no theology department or divinity school.

On the other hand, it may be useful to acquaint people with some of the arguments used by religious philosophers, like the First Cause argument, simply because we live in a religious society and those arguments are not only part of history, but are ongoing now. But if we teach those, and the ancient Greeks, we have to be aware that philosophers like Plato, Aquinas, and St. Augustine justified slavery.

4.) No. If we sidelined every academic throughout history who was bigoted, we wouldn’t be teaching anything.

Curiously, Shrage doesn’t “unpack” (to use the argot) these questions, and winds up assuming that their work does reflect their bigotry, with the implicit view that we need to teach that. Here’s her last paragraph, which conflates three questions at once:

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. For example, why not emphasize how philosophy emerged from schools of thought around the world? In the fields of history and literature, introductory courses that focus on European studies are being replaced by courses in world history and comparative literature.

There has not been a similar widespread movement to rethink the standard introduction to philosophy in terms of world philosophy. 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. Moreover, the anti-Semitic theories of Hume, Voltaire and Kant show that philosophy has rarely, if ever, been insulated from politics.

But the question is whether the philosophy has been affected by bigotry. 

Maybe students would be better served by teaching them philosophy then by minutely scrutinizing every philosopher in history (and artists and writers and scientists) for ideological impurities.