For example, there was a book from last year The Perfect Baby? It seemed to be an important exploration of the implications of genetic screeing.
Or on Hybrid Marxism thread, I once skimmed a very critical review of Chinese Communist philosophy in the 20th century where its irrationalism and propagandistic purposes were underlined. I think it's by Werner Meissner and was reviewed critically in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars a few years back, I believe. I would like to have been able to read the book and the review and ask Henry about the possibility of the possibly profound irrationalism of Chinese hybrid Marxism.
On the race thread, I am preparing some comments. For example in a book on anthro and science, ed. by Laura Nader, Troy Duster draws from Mannheim to argue that race enjoys reality as a second order construct. Its biological incoherence does not spell its social invalidity. Duster could have quoted Mannheim as Colletti does here: Social reality is nothing more than the the totality of the 'meanings' attributed to the world by members of society; these meanings however contain nothing objective, they only have a 'certain psychological-sociological function, namely to fix the attention of those men who wish to do something in common upon a certain "definition of things".' I.e. concepts now represent only 'taboos against other possible sources of meaning', mere 'myths' or pragmatic instruments which allow a 'simplfying and unifying of the manifoldness of life for the sake of action.' Quoted in Lucio Colletti, "Marxism as a Sociology". In *From Rousseau to Lenin*, p.44
As proof that historical reality is fundamentally nothing other than intensional conduct, Duster underlines that the most fundamental social inequality indeed derives simply from a myth, man's most dangerous myth as Ashley Montagu referred to race. Duster gives the example of the 10 fold racial gap in wealth. Yet he does not dwell on why the focal variable of wealth has been defined in a certain way. That is, why should wealth include assets which only provide direct services to the owner, e.g. homes and consumer durables such as cars (moreover, to some extent carlessness among blacks must to some extent be accounted for by their greater urbanity). Why not define the "wealthy" as only those who can without working actually live off assets which provide a steady income stream? In that case the *objective* poverty or the proletarian status of the majority of Americans would become clear.
best, rakesh