(Orig to FB)
If you’ve spent enough time with medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas — and, like, no one has — you’ll begin to understand how important they were. Until then, the emphasis in most retrojectively “western” philosophy had been exemplary in the sense of archetypes. The scholastics brought a more systematic approach, mainly in two ways: OT1H by fleshing out the details, so to speak, OT2H by exploring limit cases — questions that were so extreme that they stress-tested the foundations on which they were built. This is how modern law works in the US (and note well: scholasticism reached a historical point when it stopped working), and — not coincidentally — it’s also how a lot of humor works. Like the Onion, for example. The idea of granting personhood to viruses is both completely ridiculous and also the logical conclusion of a major stream in leftist thinking. If trees are “people,” if rivers have “rights,” and so on, you can kick the can down the road, but sooner or later you’ll have to ask ans answer whether viruses are “people,” have “rights,” and so on. And, in truth, when the biological research establishment insists that we need to preserve specimens of the riskiest viruses — poxes, hemorrhagic fevers, and the rest — for research purposes, we’re farther down that road than we want to admit.