Almost all venerated thinkers throughout the history of western philosophy

  • Thread starter Thread starter Zebedeesnose
  • Start date Start date
Z

Zebedeesnose

Guest
are posh white men. What now? Should we forget about this fact when reading philosophy or should it inform our opinions about the worth of their writing.
35 minutes ago - 3 days left to answer.


Additional Details
3 minutes ago

Now I think Valerie (see previous version of this question) is being rather unfair by putting words in my mouth. She's being as prejudiced as she's accusing me of being, if not more so because my question does specify WESTERN philosophy. Confucious, I think was not directly involved in this. Also, many posh white men are Jewish. I suspect the screensaver in Valerie's brain is set to accuse people of being chauvenist. Perhaps to mask her own shortcomings in the craft of broadmindedness?
1 second ago

How frustrating! Can I just clarify this question. I'm talking about when studying western philosophy, is there not something missing given that their are few writings by people who aren't rich, male and caucasian. Read the question please and stop badwagon jumping then we might get somewhere (Harrumph)
 
Mainly because they posh, white men were the best educated and only ones able to afford books and an education in the first place. Before them they were almost all Roman or Greek.
I think philosophy has widened its intake of people of different backgrounds (and also women) in the last 100 yrs.
 
I think's it's a moot point. Truth endures and rises above such petty details. If a person's thoughts are lacking in truth they won't survive.
 
How about us East Siders????

We're ascetic and oriental


Lao Tzu
Confucius
Buddha
 
...its because writers of history contained their work to their known world at the time...
...as the world grew more data was made available to the "educated"
maintaining this bias...
...such is life...thanks for the question...
 
I think its because people (majority anyway) only take the posh, rich, and acceptable by society, seriously. and that is especially in the past. No one would want to believe the rants of an uneducated person, but they would give all ears to the noise of the well-bred one.

I am certain that society dismissed a lot of geniuses in the past, never let them get published, or laughed at there faces. Just as how they laughed when the thought of the earth being round was mentioned.

There is also an example of this in "The Little Prince", the one about the astronomer who found the small meteor. No one listened to him coz he wore his traditional clothes, but when he came back wearing his european suit, they listened and published his findings.
 
A: does it diminish in anyway the importance of what they had to say? Wouldn't it be reverse-racism to disregard something important because a "posh white man" said it as opposed to, say, a poor black woman? Judging by your avatar, should we put a disclaimer before everything that you say, because you happen to be a posh white man?

B: Why is it a surprise that posh white men wrote philosophy in the posh white culture? Do we put disclaimers before Lao-Tzu and Confucius because they were posh Aasian men? Or Siddhattha Gotama and Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak because they were posh Indian men? Or Ptah-Hotep and Ron Karenga because they are posh African men? Or do we acknowledge that, the rich were the ones with the free time to sit around and think about these sort of things, and the men were the only ones allowed to do so, so it stands to reason that they would be the only ones who arrived at these insights.
 
IF you look at most early western history it is all done by white men with money, with a few exceptions. This is how history was written, a woman could not have gotten any work published, nor could a black man, at the time. It is only recently that races and sex's where considered equal, and even then only it some places is this so. So the reason that all early philosophers in my opinion ae largely posh white males, is because these people had time to waste and think about the world around them in a different view. It had nothing to do with men being smarted then women or white being more intelligent than any other race, it had everything to do with free time, allowing the rich to feel more in tune with the world.
 
Back
Top