Off-topic? Immanuel Kant is slapped around, and his thought (philosophy) almost dismissed

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Kant’s philosophy is endemic to academics and thinkers of all stripes. Our pal Bryan Sentes is a fan, even though I’ve tried to disabuse him of liking the great man so fervently, and Bryan is fervent.

Bryan W. Van Norden – the James Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar and Chair Professor in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University – in TLS [the Times Literary Supplement for March 6, 2020] reviewing a new book, Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding by Roel Sterckx [Pelican, £20] wrote this:

“ … Kant himself was notoriously racist. He stated explicitly in his lectures that only whites are capable of philosophy. Indians, Chinese, Africans, and the Indigenous Americans are, Kant solemnly explained, innately incapable of the sort of abstract thought necessary for philosophy. Most contemporary philosophers would denounce this sort of explicit racism, but they accept uncritically the fruit of it: the assumption that there just never was any philosophy outside of the Anglo-European tradition.” [TLS, Page 36]

And in an aside Van Norden writes:

(Contemporary cosmologists take note: the origin of the physical universe in the Big Bang leaves unanswered the question of what created the Big Bang.) [ibid]

The review is about how Chinese (or other societal) philosophies are often more valid than that of the Enlightenment stained Western philosophies.

Bryan, who is an enthusiast for indigenous cultures and peoples – like the Aborigines of Australia – and accepts their myths and lore is, inversely, soaked in Western philosophy, thinking, such man- nered thought is remarkable and useful in the hunt for truth and knowledge, even an explanation for UFOs, something I’ve decried often here: Philosophy can’t help in the search for what UFOs are [October 8 and 12, 2019 in this blog.]

I don’t want o pick on Bryan. He’s a buddy, but often on the wrong track about things, absorbed by what academia thinks is pertinent, when it really isn’t.

(If he responds,  the response will be filled with academic gobbledygook as usual, and I’m not in the mood, like Van Norden, to deal with it.)

RR