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Comment by trentmb | Hacker News Reader

Are there any Marxist or African-American perspectives you might be able to recommend?

Marxism is a little tough because for much of the twentieth century you had the split between Soviet and western marxism, where the Soviet branch considered itself properly "scientific" while the western branch engaged with more humanist themes from philosophy. In my opinion the philosophy of science developed in western marxism is much more interesting than the scientism of the Soviets. German philosopher Max Horkheimer's essay "Critical and Traditional Theory" (1937) is a classic and very influential formulation of a western marxist philosophy of science.

I don't know about African American philosophy, but among Latin American philosophers Enrique Ambrosini Dussel has done much to advance a unique perspective on epistemology and philosophy of science. In the English-speaking world his work has been championed by Sandra Harding, who was mentioned by another commenter.

Not sure that it's classified as "Philosophy of Science" but Mackenzie Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto" is pretty darn Marxist ... it even has a red cover :) Here's a 10th-anniversary interview of him by Melissa Gregg: https://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/courting-vectoralists-...

On the African-American perspective, nothing leaps to mind, sorry. Anybody else have suggestions?

Thanks-

I've recently started a 'It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it' sort of pursuit- I'm currently stumbling through Lois Tysons' "Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide"

EDIT: I mean that I'm doing my best to suspend/address whatever judgments I currently have, not immediately discard what I read.

Haven't read it but it looks great. And yes, seems like a great exercise to entertain thoughts while suspending judgement.

Surely 'It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it' is a mark of any competent developer , After all you very often have to entertain competing theories about the inner workings of a program and pretty much everyone involved, users, maintainers, architects, managers, etc., will have a different theory. As a developer you will probably have to be able to discuss all of them without necessarily accepting any.

Unfortunately this does not necessarily require an educated mind.

Thanks for this comment. While trying to track down the source of the quote, I ran into this interesting, if a bit oddly formatted, blog post:

http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/02/aristotle-and-accur...

There are a few good comments there, too, followed by a bunch of me-toos.

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