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Nietzsche asserts, in a prejudice of his era, that a woman's intellectual inclinations betray a disorder in her sexual nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche · Dincolo de bine și de rău · 1886 · 1441 minute readpublic domain
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.Friedrich Nietzsche · Dincolo de bine și de rău · 1886 · 144

Even radical thinkers can absorb their era's prejudices without ever examining them.

The line comes from the aphorisms on women in Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche builds an anthropology we now recognize as misogynist. His logic: he believed woman has a nature dominated by the reproductive role, so any drift toward scholarship would be a symptom of imbalance. A reader today takes it as a document of how even radical thinkers absorbed their era's stereotypes unexamined, and as a warning against pseudo-biological explanations of talent.

Why it mattersIt works as a case study in how prejudices disguise themselves as psychological observations; useful in discussions about stereotypes that still survive in the evaluation of women in science.

Premise: fixednatureScience equals deviationDisguised prejudiceLesson: examinestereotypes
From Nietzsche's premise flow conclusions we now recognize as misogynist

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