Justin E. H. Smith

Race, Essence, and the Historical Life of Natural Kinds

[Presented in the colloquium series of the Boğaziçi University Philosophy Department, 21 July, 2009]

Recent research at the boundary of cognitive anthropology and philosophy in the field of ‘folk taxonomy’ or ‘folk biology’ has drawn remarkable conclusions about the regularity of certain aspects of classification across cultures.  Atran 1990 has argued that in the highly structured and articulated domain of folk-taxonomical knowledge, there are universal constraints upon the different ways different cultures may carve the world up, and that Aristotle, and later Linnaeus, were no more free of these constraints than were the Guatemalan Indians whose taxonomic system Atran himself studied. Francisco Gil-White 2001 has extended this programme of research from cognition of animal and plant kinds to subkinds of the human species, that is, to what are generally called 'races'. Gil-White's argument is that not only is there an a priori structure for cognizing and classifying biological species, but human cultural groups are also, in turn, constrained to think of other human cultural groups on the model of biological species: that is, the same innate tendency toward essentialism about animal kinds is what makes human beings, everywhere and for the most part, racists. But there are some points of disanalogy that threaten Gil-White's thesis, the most important being that species are biologically significant categories (even if evolutionary theory has taken them down a few notches from their earlier status as eternal natural kinds on a par with gold or even triangles), whereas races are not. Part of Atran's thesis had been that, while rough, folk-biological taxonomy generally maps reliably onto the divisions in nature, whereas there simply are no corresponding divisions in nature that might enable "folk racial science" to "get it right." Where then do racial categories come from, if not an a priori fit between the mind and the natural world? Here, it will be helpful to introduce Hacking's notion of 'historical kind', and to consider in terms of it the relatively recent emergence of 'race' as a distinctively scientific category. What we see when we do this is that, while some variety of us/them dichotimization may be an inelimnable feature of human cognition of social reality, it was by no means inevitable that this feature should develop into a quasi-biological classificatory scheme. For this to happen, there also had to be a distinct confluence of ideas, particularly in the work of Buffon, Blumenbach, Kant and others, about human nature and human diversity. The aim of this talk will be to spell these out.

A Recent Talk

From Tractorics to Pyrotechnics: Leibniz's Model of Animal Bodies

[Submitted for the First Quebec Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, université de Sherbrooke, October 10, 2009]

Scholars have long been aware that 'mechanist' or 'mechanical philosopher' is a very slippery label. There seem to be no necessary or sufficient conditions for classifying certain philosophers as mechanists but not others, and much as with 'feminist' or 'analytic philosopher', the prudent taxonomist will simply permit all self-identifiers to come under the label, while withholding it from anyone who does not actively embrace it. But things may be even more problematic than we've thought: not only do we not really know what a mechanist is; we also don't have a clear idea of what is to count as a machine.  Most scholars have taken one kind of machine --the machine driven by pulleys, gears, and levers, and identified somewhat derisively by Kaspar Schott in his 1657 Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica as a merely 'tractoric' machine-- as the model of mechanicity in general.  'Mechanist' philosophers have accordingly often been criticized for letting their analogical imaginations run wild, since patently animal bodies (to cite the most obvious stumbling block for a universally applicable science of tractorics) are not composed of gears and levers.  But there were in fact many other kinds of machine, driven by fundamentally different principles than those of the clock.  As the title of his book suggests, Schott was mostly interested in machines driven by water and air.  Others --particularly those such as Cornelis Drebbel and Joachim Becher who sought to build their own perpetual-motion machines-- were more interested in chemical principles such as fermentation than in tractoric principles as a source of machine motion. 

Still others, such as Robert Boyle and G. W. Leibniz, were principally interested in what Leibniz would call 'hydraulico-pneumatico-pyrotechnical [HPP] machines', that is machines that are kept in motion by the appropriate interaction of air, water, and a certain kind of chemical explosion akin to that in gunpowder.  Leibniz thought animal bodies were just such a machine.  Given that Leibniz was also a panorganicist who believed that, in the end, everything is an animal body or somehting like it, clearly it should be important for scholars to pay attention to the sort of machine he took animal bodies to be.  In this presentation, I shall summarize Leibniz's theory of HPP machines, and I shall attempt to show the importance of this theory for our understanding of his theory of corporeal substance, and ultimately for our understanding of his deepest ontological commitments.  On the basis of Leibniz's example, I shall further argue that much late-17th-century mechanism, far from amounting to a crude 'contraptionism' that would seek to reduce the complexity of natural beings to whatever passed at a given moment of history for state-of-the-art technology, in fact sought to incorporate knowledge of processes gained in the first instance from direct investigation of natural processes that clearly defied any attempt to model them tractorically.