Rethinking Prejudice (2000, reissued 2019) examines the Enlightenment’s struggle against prejudices and the Counter-Enlightenment’s partisanship in favour of them. “
Dorschel wants to subvert that controversy by way of refuting an assumption shared by both parties” (“Dorschel will diesen Streit unterlaufen, indem er eine von beiden geteilte Annahme widerlegt”), to wit, that prejudices are bad or good, false or true because they are prejudices.
As Richard Raatzsch puts it, Dorschel “seeks out the common source of both parties’ errors through rendering each position as strong as possible” (“den gemeinsamen Quellen der Irrtümer beider Seiten nachgeht, indem er sie so plausibel wie möglich zu machen sucht”).
Prejudices, Dorschel concludes, can be true or false, intelligent or stupid, wise or foolish, positive or negative, good or bad, racist or humanist – and they possess none of these features simply qua prejudices.
The conclusion’s significance derives from the fact that it is part and parcel of “an account which preserves something of the common-sense notion of prejudice, rather than an abstract list of necessary and sufficient conditions that risks neglecting what people have historically meant and continue to mean by the term.”
Rethinking Prejudice (2000, reissued 2019) examines the Enlightenment’s struggle against prejudices and the Counter-Enlightenment’s partisanship in favour of them. “Dorschel wants to subvert that controversy by way of refuting an assumption shared by both parties” (“Dorschel will diesen Streit unterlaufen, indem er eine von beiden geteilte Annahme widerlegt”), to wit, that prejudices are bad or good, false or true because they are prejudices. As Richard Raatzsch puts it, Dorschel “seeks out the common source of both parties’ errors through rendering each position as strong as possible” (“den gemeinsamen Quellen der Irrtümer beider Seiten nachgeht, indem er sie so plausibel wie möglich zu machen sucht”). Prejudices, Dorschel concludes, can be true or false, intelligent or stupid, wise or foolish, positive or negative, good or bad, racist or humanist – and they possess none of these features simply qua prejudices. The conclusion’s significance derives from the fact that it is part and parcel of “an account which preserves something of the common-sense notion of prejudice, rather than an abstract list of necessary and sufficient conditions that risks neglecting what people have historically meant and continue to mean by the term.”
Andreas Dorschel