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?)
Required Texts:
Robert R. Bernasconi and T. L. Lott, The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000).
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).
A packet of course readings will be available for purchase at the Concordia Bookstore.
The Internet resource, History of Race in Science (www.racesci.org), will also be used.
Course Requirements
25% attendance and participation.
25% in-class presentation of course material.
50% final research paper (8-10 pages for undergraduates, 12-15 pages for MA students) on a topic chosen in consultation with the professor.
Course Schedule
3 September
Week 1. Race in Current Metaphysics and Cognitive Science; The Decline of Racial Science in the 20th Century.
Ian Hacking, “Why Race Still Matters” (electronic text)
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “"Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections, Part I" (packet)
F. J. Gil-White, “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain? Essentialism in our Cognition of Some Social Categories” (electronic text)
Stephen Jay Gould, excerpt from The Mismeasure of Man (packet)
10 September
Week 2. The discovery of the New World in Philosophical Perspective
Bartolomé de las Casas, excerpt from The Destruction of the Indies (packet)
Anthony Pagden, excerpt from Aristotle and the Native Americans (packet)
Tzvetan Todorov, excerpt from The Conquest of America (packet)
17 September
Week 3. Early Modern Ethnography and Arguments for Moral Relativism
Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Cannibals’ (packet)
24 September
Week 4. Polygenesis and Pre-Adamism
Isaac La Peyrère, excerpt from Men before Adam, or, a Discourse upon the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth verses of the Fifth Chapter of the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans (packet)
Richard H. Popkin, excerpt from Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work and Influence (packet)
1 October
Week 5. The Spectre of Pagan Rationality
G. W. Leibniz, excerpt from the Novissima Sinica (packet)
G. W. Leibniz, excerpt from the Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (packet)
8 October
Week 6. The First Attempts at a Racial Taxonomy; ‘Man’ in 18th-Century ‘Systems of Nature’
François Bernier, “New Division of the Earth” (Bernasconi and Lott)
Carl von Linné, ‘Homo’, in The System of Nature (Eze)
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, excerpt from A Natural History, General and Particular (Eze)
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “On the Natural Variety of Mankind” (Bernasconi and Lott)
15 October
Week 7. The ‘Radical’ Enlightenment and the African
Voltaire, “Of the Different Races of Men,” (Bernasconi and Lott)
“Nègre,” from the Encyclopédie (Eze)
22 October
Week 8. Man, Ape, and What Lies Between: The Birth of Primatology
Edward Tyson, excerpt from Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, or the Anatomy of a Pygmie (packet)
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, excerpt from The Origin and Progress of Man and Language (packet)
29 October
Week 9. Degenerationism and Pre-Darwinian Evolutionism
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, excerpt from Elements of Geography (packet)
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “Degeneration of the Species” (Eze)
Georges Léopold Cuvier, “Varieties of the Human Species” (Eze)
5 November
Week 10. David Hume on ‘Lapps and Negroes’: The Savage as Empiricist Gedankenexperiment
David Hume, excerpt from Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (packet)
12 November
Week 11. Immanuel Kant
Kant “Of the Different Human Races,” (Bernasconi and Lott)
Kant, “On National Characterstics” (Eze)
Kant, excerpt from the Physical Geography (Eze)
19 November
Week 12. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
Johann Gottfried Herder, “Organization of the Peoples of Africa” (Eze)
Immanuel Kant, Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Eze)
26 November
Week 13. Racial Essentialism and the Hardening of Racial Ideology
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Eze)
Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races (Bernasconi and Lott)
Additional Reading
The Metaphysics of Natural Kinds, The Cognitive Science of Classification, Etc.:
John Dupré, "Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa," Philosophical Review 90, no. 1 (January 1981): 66-90.
Ian Hacking, "Making Up People," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Edited by Thomas C. Heller and Christine Brooke-Rose. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).
Michael O. Hardimon, "The Ordinary Concept of Race." Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 9 (September 2003): 437-55.
Sally Haslanger, "Gender and Race: What Are They? What Do We Want Them To Be?" Nous 34, no. 1 (2000): 31-55.
G. E. R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and the Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Jasper Reid, "Natural Kind Essentialism," in Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80, no. 1 (2002): 62-74.
(What Remains of) the Science of Race:
Michael J. Bamhad, and Steve E. Olson, “Does Race Exist? Human Genetic Diversity, in Scientific American 289, no. 6 (December 2003): 78-85.
Ned Block, “How Heritability Misleads about Race,” in The Boston Review 20, 6 (January, 1996): 30-35. Available at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html.
Morris Foster, and Richard Sharp. "Race, Ethnicity, and Genomics: Social Classifications as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity." Genome Research 12, no. 6 (June 2002): 844-850.
Shomarka Keita, and Rick Kittles. "The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence." American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (September 1997): 534-544.
Phimister, and Elizabeth. "Medicine and the Racial Divide." New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 12 (March 20, 2003): 1081-1082.
Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang, “Categorization of Human Beings in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race, and Disease,” in Genome Biology 3, no. 7 (July 1, 2002): 1-12. Available at http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/7/comment/2007.
The History of Racial Science:
Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge University Press), 1992.
Robert Bernasconi, American Theories of Polygenesis: Concepts of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Continuum-Thoemmes Press, 2002).
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1982).
Race, Religion, and Early Modern Anthropology:
Marcelo Dascal and Elhanan Yakira (Eds.), Leibniz and Adam (Tel Aviv, 1993).
Giuliano Gliozzi, Adam et le nouveau monde. La naissance de l'anthropologie comme idéologie coloniale: des généalogies bibliques aux théories raciales (1500 - 1700) (Paris: Théétète, 2000).
Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: Commerce of Light (Cambridge, 2005).
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Brill, 1987).
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Harper Books, 1987).
Race and Anthropology in the Enlightenment:
Raj Bhopal, “The Beautiful Skull and Blumenbach’s Errors: The Birth of the Scientific Concept of Race,” British Medical Journal 335 (December, 2007): 1308-9.
Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Harvard University Press, 2002).
Jeff Loveland, Rhetoric and Natural History: Buffon in Polemical and Literary Context (Oxford, 2001).
Ulrich Ricken, Linguistics, Anthropology and Philosophy in the French Enlightenment (Taylor & Francis, 2007).
Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Eds.), The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2007).
John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Race in Existentialism and Postcolonial Theory
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Tr. Richard Philcox. (New York, Grove Press, 2004).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999).
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