Philosophers on Race Critical Essays

by Ward, Julie K.; Lott, Tommy L.

• ISBN13: 9780631222262
• ISBN10: 063122226X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-03-01
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This volume adds a new dimension to current research on race theory by examining its historical roots in the works of major Western philosophers. The essays included in this book span a wide range of topics, including the opposition between Greek and barbarian in the works of Plato and Aristotle, the notion of racial difference employed in medieval Islamic thought, as well as the existence of racial categories within the social contract and Enlightenment theories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. The readings also discuss repercussions in the post-Enlightenment period in the views of Nietzsche, Mill, and Carlyle, and twentieth-century reflections on race in the thought of Heidegger, Dewey, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Philosophers on Race contributes to the increasing debate on the subject of race by elucidating the philosophical origins of race in Greek and medieval thought and the subsequent development of racial categories in modern Western philosophy.

Author Biography

Julie K. Ward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. She has published papers both in ancient philosophy and in feminism, and edited the anthology Feminism and Ancient Philosophy (1996), to which she contributed a chapter on Aristotle's theory of friendship.

Tommy L. Lott is Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University. He is author of The Invention of Race (Blackwell 1999), editor of Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy (1998), and co-editor, with Robert Bernasconi, of The Idea of Race (2000).

Table of Contents

Contributors	vii
Acknowledgments	x
Introduction	xi
Distinction Without a Difference? Race and Genos in Plato	1	(13)
Rachana Kamtekar
Ethnos in the Politics: Aristotle and Race	14	(24)
Julie K. Ward
Medieval Muslim Philosophers on Race	38	(25)
Paul-A. Hardy
Patriarchy and Slavery in Hobbes's Political Philosophy	63	(18)
Tommy L. Lott
``An Inconsistency not to be Excused'': On Locke and Racism	81	(20)
William Uzgalis
Locke and the Dispossession of the American Indian	101	(24)
Kathy Squadrito
Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau's Second Discourse	125	(20)
Francis Moran III
Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism	145	(22)
Robert Bernasconi
``The Great Play and Fight of Forces'': Nietzsche on Race	167	(28)
Daniel W. Conway
Liberalism's Limits: Carlyle and Mill on ``The Negro Question''	195	(10)
David Theo Goldberg
Heidegger and the Jewish Question: Metaphysical Racism in Silence and Word	205	(17)
Berel Lang
Sartre on American Racism	222	(19)
Julien Murphy
Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism	241	(19)
Lewis R. Gordon
Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism	260	(25)
Margaret A. Simons
Dewey's Philosophical Approach to Racial Prejudice	285	(13)
Gregory Fernando Pappas
Index	298