PHILOSOPHY - Race: Racial Ontology #1 (Introduction)

My favorite part of this channel is how it makes university professors actually good at drawing on the whiteboard.

Philosophers have the property of overusing the word "Property".

Race makes sense evolutionary speaking. And we know that animals adapt to their environments causing slightly differences in appearance, this is just a fact all you need to do is look at bonobos at chips. To see that members of the same species can differ in appreance due to apdapation to their local environment. This is what Race is and it's not a sociohistroical construct.

Races are real biological kinds. It's fashionable to deny this, but that's mostly driven by the facts that (a) antirealism about race has become politically correct, and (b) social constructionism about everything is trendy in the social sciences and middle-brow discussions. The arguments normally cited for the unreality of race are simply invalid. Yes, the races aren't very different biologically. But humans aren't very different from chimps; that doesn't mean they aren't two different species. The question is: are the differences real and systematic? Not: are they big? One could go on and on...but there seems to be no reasoning with the true believers right now. These fits of social insanity usually blow over, people calm down, and a few years from now it'll be possible for people to be rational about this again. At which point people will look back on the array of fallacious arguments against the reality of race and it will be hard for them to believe that some kind of mass insanity about this subject gripped so many people. Mostly the fad is driven by the idea that believing that race is real is somehow racist (which is obviously false), and that discrediting the idea of race can help diminish racism (which probably isn't true...but it might be... But that is not an admissible reason.). Political motives then take over, and that's what's really motivating the fad.

totally off topic but i chuckled at 6:06 when everyone but the philosopher was a cat

I'm pretty sure that when you investigate difference in groups of people from a sociohistorical perspective it's called cultures and not races. I mean, I might aswell start saying a tomato is a vegetable because of sociohistorical reasons, but that doesn't make it true.

really interesting, thanks!

Excellent video, who can do me a favor to tell me how or which software can make such a video? I mean that with a hand drawing and writing on screen. Thanks a lot!

You can argue anything... Do colors exist? What wavelength is red? Do see red the same way I do? Most colors are just a combination of other colors... etc.

People who live in mountains will be different than people who live on plain farms. The body of the mountain man is adapted for lower oxygen more than the farmer man. Also, someone who lives nearer to the equator will have darker skin than someone from the arctic to block out more UV light and the arctic man lighter to create more vitamin D since UV light is less that north up. Also humans split up during our migration across the planet, causing many seperated people and causinh differences.

I'm not so sure about the semantic difference theory. Just because some experts have a definition for words that im using, doesnt mean that i am speaking in a meaningful way. I think the meaning of words is not defined by other people. The meaning of a word just comes with the intention of the speaker. Meaning words only mean what i mean with it.

Also I just realized this video is recent and the others haven't been released yet. Agony. Can't wait for the others!

Are there other things that we categorise as within a "Partially Natural" domain?

In the long term, I expect that references to race will be supplanted by descriptions of cultural identity.

Totally incomprehensible.

Never seen a presentation on race so devoid of actual scholarship on the philosophy of race. Did you deliberately ignore every philosopher on this subject or are you unaware that they exist?

Great talk, but I feel like all professors of philosophy are speed talkers, I'm barely keeping up even at half the speed.

You just spent 8 minutes discussing the ontology of a thing that you never even once tried to define. I could have replaced "race" with "tribbles" and this video would have been just as tautologically relevant. Pro-tip guys. First define "race" before waxing philosophical over what "kind of thing" a race is. Then you can talk about whether or not that definition is valid and cogent.

For me, races are competitions between two or more fast moving vehicles, humans or animals.

race is a class of lineages