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my main takeaway: so far from knowing whether or not to cancel Aristotle, I do not know what "to cancel" means https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/should-we-cancel-aristotle.html
I do definitely however enjoy the pleasant frisson of seeing Aristotle in the NYT, for which I deeply appreciate @AgnesCallard making that happen!
also, wait for it, it allows me to make many jokes, such as:
did Descartes write this op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/should-we-cancel-aristotle.html
much focus on interp of Aristotle, which I do disagree with on some points, but that's not the point, the point is finding a test case for someone really entrenched who also is unambiguously bad, which is worth considering
Aristotle could potentially be a decent example because he seems like a decent laid back guy, he’s not Nietzsche or Schopenhauer
(BTW if you want to dive deeply here, check out my colleague’s amazing book on the connections between Aristotle’s gendered view of metaphysics, physics, and biology! https://www.amazon.com/Feminine-Symptom-Aleatory-Matter-Aristotelian/dp/0823262197
I see cancellation as a struggle to talk about morality, while remaining in a very abstract and ambiguous place—and it also is obviously self-vitiating, because no one can really remain cancelled in the sense of ostracized, we don’t have the social cohesion
my official position is we need to talk publicly about morality, but we are really, really bad at doing it
cancellation seems to unhelpfully confuse the moral clarity we feel when we feel we can say someone definitively did something wrong, with what we ought to do about it, and what is possible to do about it
anyway, what I really appreciated about the piece is that I do think the philosophy classroom can bring about a space where we can attempt to consider without hostility things that we otherwise have good reason to consider hostile
but I'm very deeply skeptical about how this mode of conversation can be brought into the public, or political, or moral sphere: and here I just don't know the answer
