Justin E. H. Smith

Philosophical Anthropology and the Problem of Human Diversity in the New Science of Nature, 1500-1800

(Bibliography to my research grant application for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Resarch Council of Canada, 2009-12)

Primary Sources

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PHIL 498/629: Race in Enlightenment Philosophy

Concordia University
Fall, 2008

RACE IN ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHY

Wednesday, 18.00-20.15

PR-100
Prof. Justin Smith

Race does not exist, and this is a course about it. That is, there is no scientifically interesting way in which humanity may be divided up into a handful of real sub-kinds; to speak of ‘Caucasians’, ‘Blacks’, etc., is to fail, as philosophers like to say, to carve nature at its joints. Yet in spite of their scientific bankruptcy --universally recognized by all mainstream anthropologists and biologists since the end of World War II-- these categories continue to seem very pertinent in the way we talk about our social reality. Why is this? The full answer has much to do with economics, sociology, etc., but also something to do with the history of science, and with the effort to lay conceptual foundations for science within the history of philosophy since roughly the beginning of the 17th century. It is on the early stages of this history, from Montaigne to Kant, that we will be focusing in this course. We will seek to understand how it is that the modern concept of race, and the accompanying ideology of racism, came into existence as a result, in part, of the theoretical reflections of some of modern Europe’s greatest thinkers upon that central philosophical question, Quid sit homo? (What is a human being?)