I was helping my gf with a paper for her philosophy class and part of the reading was from the book Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith. In the first chapter of the book Smith argues that Postmodern Metaphysics is handling social injustice better that previous periods. As an example he makes the claim:
This struck me as a tad bit unlikely and he gave no citation for the ‘fact’. At first I just assumed that he, or his editor, must have checked this so, while still questioning it, I assumed that he had something to back that up. Several pages later, though, he ‘quoted’ David Hume as saying that ‘The worst white man is as good as the best black man’, and rather than saying where Hume had written that line he actually states that he was pretty sure he had read it somewhere in Hume’s letters, but he couldn’t actually find it again. At that point I began to completely distrusted anything the man wrote without clear and precise citation.
I looked up the Brooklyn Zoo fact, but the only things I can find reference only the Huston Smith book, so I am curious if anyone can back up Smith on this point, or on his David Hume ‘quote’ for that matter.
