Over the last two years, generative AI has smashed our ideas of what intelligence means, what AI can and cannot do, and of our place in the cosmos. A two-thousand year old journey from Aristotle to today, has culminated in a moment where human exceptionalism has finally been challenged.
By Matthew A. Sears April 6 at 6:00 AM
Matthew A. Sears is an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick.
Race science is back.
To be fair, it never really left. But in the past few years, an obsession over the intersection of race and science and in particular, the use of science to shore up theories of racial hierarchies has seen a resurgence. At the heart of this revival: Charles Murray, co-author of the notorious 1994 book on innate intelligence and public policy, “The Bell Curve.”
… To understand the underlying assumptions of Murray and others, it’s helpful to look back to the granddaddy of all racial theorists: Aristotle. In understanding the role Aristotle played in laying the groundwork for “race science,” we can better understand how ingrained it is in Western science and philosophy, and why the alt-right’s embrace of “western civilization” has a particularly chilling edge.