Good Prejudice. A Passing Foray in Intellectual History

Abstract

It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the exact time when the pejoration of “prejudice” occurred. Nor can “prejudice” be understood once and for all as being exclusively a poorly formed opinion, an unreasonable belief, a false judgement, a sentiment, an assumption dictated or corrupted by sentiment, a bad behaviour, or an admixture of them, at least as far as intellectual history is concerned. Though assuming only one particular meaning of the term ab initio may be very convenient, speakers, erudite ones included, have been using “prejudice” in many ways, the variety of which linguists and other researchers at large cannot but acknowledge and report to varying degrees. Unlike artificial technical terms—e.g. the classical legal interpretation of “praejudicium”—and like all important concepts of our natural languages—e.g. love, justice, beauty, education—“prejudice” too is polysemic, ambiguous, living, contestable and contested. Within the history of philosophy, moreover, it is even possible to find positive appraisals of the term itself and the present short text lists and comments on many of them.