1. Spinoza, Ethics 5, Prop. 42, Schol.
2. I borrow the term “transcendental delusion” from Linda Martín Alcoff, “Philosophy and Philosophical Practice: Eurocentrism as an Epistemology of Ignorance,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 397–400.
3. In his drama De Beneficiis, Seneca consistently opposes the sapiens and the stultus, the wise man and the stupid or foolish man. See Gerard B. Lavery, “The Adversarius in Seneca’s De Beneficiis,” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 40, nos. 1/2 (1987): 97–106.
4. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 214; T. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), § 79.
5. A. Smith, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 1, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.ii.3.7.
6. F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3, § 11.
7. F. Nietzsche, “Mixed Opinions and Maxims,” in Human, All Too Human II, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 62. Hereafter cited as HH2.
8. Quassim Cassam, Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 2.
12. The relatively new field of epistemic vices, concerned with how we can fail to know certain things, is expanding rapidly. In addition to Cassam’s Vices of the Mind, the following books and articles are particularly relevant for the vices (and some of the virtues) I will be discussing: Heather Battaly, “Varieties of Epistemic Vice,” in The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, ed. Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 51–76; Quassim Cassam, “Vice Ontology,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (2017): 20–27; Ian Kidd, “Capital Epistemic Vices,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (2017): 11–16; Brent J. C. Madison, “On the Nature of Intellectual Vice,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6 (2017): 1–6; José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kevin Mulligan, “Foolishness, Stupidity, and Cognitive Value,” The Monist 97, no. 1 (1994): 65–85.
13. Cassam, Vices of the Mind, 2. I have to agree with Cassam that if we define stupidity as “foolishness or lack of common sense” (4), then it can be seen as an intellectual vice. But I will try to argue for stupidity as a force that blocks or inhibits the power of thought; and I will resist the temptation to identify thought with common sense. In the end, what matters is not whether we identify those vices as intellectual (spite, rancor, and resentment are certainly not intellectual, at least not in any obvious way), but how we define them, and we think of the faculty we call “intellect.”
14. M. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: the Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 21.
15. F. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 137. Volume cited hereafter as UM.
16. M. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 25.
17. M. Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, Power, ed. James. D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 13; Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Essential Works: Power, 131.
18. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Essential Works: Power, 133.
19. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Medina, Epistemology of Resistance.
20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
21. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). The concept of hegemony is the unifying thread of Antonio Gramsci’s four-volume Prison Notebooks, or Quaderni del carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 2014). Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,”...