Aristotle: The Father of Scientific Racism

I can’t believe that I missed this article:

“But these ideas are even older than Klein realizes. 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.

Most famous as a philosopher, Aristotle — who, it’s worth noting, is Murray’s favorite philosopher — was just as influential in what we would today consider the field of natural science. Indeed, Aristotle’s philosophical and political ideas cannot be separated from his methods of empirical observation. He spent years of his life observing and classifying animals. Charles Darwin himself said that “my two gods [Linnaeus and Cuvier] are mere school-boys to old Aristotle.” …”

I’ve been rereading Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics over the past few weeks as part of my alternative morality project. It has been years since I have engaged with it.