The publication that the Quillette gang has been waiting for, for at least a couple of years, appeared the other day, The Journal of Controversial Ideas. I will be talking about the Journal soon but want to talk about the interview with one of the three official editors, Peter Singer.
The interview was in The New Yorker, which is rarely a good omen for race science supporters, and so...
NEW YORKER
A lot of your works cite white male academics who, for lack of a better phrase, take up a lot of space in intellectual conversations: Joshua Greene, Steven Pinker, Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Sandel, Benedict Anderson, John Rawls, to name a few. Because so much of your work is fundamentally about equity, I wonder if that is something that’s on your radar.
SINGER
That’s the manner in which I was educated, I suppose, and which still is very influential in the ideas that I’m involved with. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of philosophers who are not male, but they have been white generally. I’ve got a project now about the issue of global population, with Alex Ezeh, a demographer of Nigerian origin at Drexel University. I worked with Pascal Kasimba when I was at Monash University, who is of African descent, on a project relating to in-vitro fertilization. I have also co-authored things with people of Asian descent, with Yew-Kwang Ng, for instance. But, I have to say, I want to work with people whose ideas are, you know, at a level of discussion that I’m interested in, and that I’m progressing. If you’re thinking of the work of Africans, for example, I don’t know the work of many of them that is really in the same sort of—I’m not quite sure how to put this—participating in the same discussion as the people you’ve just mentioned.
Now that I've looked at Singer's activities, I think it's likely Singer likes to cite Pinker - who is not a philosopher - so often because Singer also supports race science. More about that soon.
