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Michael Levin
Full name	Michael Levin
Born	21 May 1943
Era	Contemporary Philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic Philosophy, Reliabilism
Main interests	Epistemology, Philosophy of Race
Notable ideas	Heritability of Intelligence

Michael Levin is a libertarian philosophy professor at City University of New York. He has published on metaphysics, epistemology, race, homosexuality, animal rights, the philosophy of archaeology, the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science.

His central research interests are in Epistemology (Reliabilism and Gettier Problems) and in philosophy of race. He favors the view that there are racial differences that are inherited.

Education

He studied at Columbia University where he received a doctoral degree.

Philosophical views

Levin's views are controversial. He is critical of certain strands of feminism and argues that homosexual sex is less satisfying than heterosexual sex because, he contends, it is a misuse of body parts. ^[1][2] He teaches that genetics play an important part in the variation in world cultures and he is an advocate of reliabilism in epistemology and the theory of compatibilism in free will. Levin writes for libertarian publications such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute newsletter "The Free Market" and The Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Levin's view that white people score higher on IQ tests than black people due to genetic differences has been widely criticized.^[3][4]

He was cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center's publication Intelligence Report (Summer 2006) for repeatedly addressing the American Renaissance at that white supremacist organization's bi-annual conferences and then not attending due to anti-Semitism he encountered among members.^[5]

Selected publications

Books

• Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem, Oxford University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-19-824415-0.
• Feminism and Freedom, Transaction Publishers, 1987. ISBN 978-0887386701
• Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean, Praeger Publishers, 1997. ISBN 0-275-95789-6

Articles and essays

• The Case for Torture
• Compatibilism and Special Relativity, an influential essay in the philosophy of physics published recently in the Journal of Philosophy.
• In Defense of Scrooge [1], a libertarian apology in favor of the popular protagonist of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

Further reading

• Swain, Carol M.; Russ Nieli (2003-03-24). Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521816734.  

External links

• Levin's academic page at CUNY