Abstract
A philosophical understanding of race begins with the canon. In the Republic, Socrates proposed telling youth that they are born with traits of leaders, soldiers, or workers. Aristotle accepted slavery as natural and described enslaved Asians as lacking in spirit. Saint Paul and Saint Aquinas accepted slavery in this world. John Locke reserved slavery for captives taken in a just war. Hume said that nonwhites, especially Africans, are inferior to whites. Kant posited racial essences as determining moral worth and intellectual capabilities. Hegel posited geography as determining human difference and called Africa “the land of childhood.” Nietzsche assumed racial hierarchy and proposed a new blonde ruling race. John Stuart Mill reserved liberty for mature individuals and societies advanced in civilization.
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Essay and Discussion Questions
Essay and Discussion Questions
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1.
Why do you think it’s important to avoid anachronism in discussing ideas resembling race before the modern period?
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2.
What are the main differences between Plato and Aristotle’s views of who should be enslaved?
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3.
Do you think Locke’s failure to extend fundamental rights to women, the poor, and non-Europeans means that his political philosophy was not based on his avowed principles of liberty and freedom?
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4.
What are the implications of the fact that Africans were enslaved before a biological concept of human races were developed?
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5.
Hume was a polygenist and Kant was a monogenist. Explain how their assessments of racial differences were or were not related to their different beliefs about human origins.
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6.
Explain and critically evaluate the difference between Kant’s claim that Africans lacked intelligence and reason and that they lacked taste.
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7.
How did Kant’s reliance on racial essences and Hegel’s on geography influence their views of human races?
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8.
What are the implications of John Stuart Mill’s restrictions of liberty to Europeans?
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9.
In what ways was Nietzsche a racialist? Was he also a racist?
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10.
How might a philosopher’s views on race be relevant to other aspects of that thinker’s work? How are nonracial views held by a philosopher related to that thinkers’ views on race?
Glossary
- autonomy
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—self-rule, being in charge of one’s own life.
- biological racial determinism
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—idea that inherited human racial traits determine social, psychological, physical, and cultural traits.
- deliberation
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—for Aristotle, the intellectual activity of practical wisdom that allows one to practice or develop virtues.
- dignitarian
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—pertaining to the intrinsic value of human individuals.
- essences
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—qualities of things that make them what they are and cause their other qualities.
- ethnology
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—nineteenth-century studies of the history of human cultures that related cultural differences to inherited racial traits.
- eugenics
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—practice and ideology of improving the quality of humanity by regulating who can have children, and with whom.
- identity
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—what a person is, naturally or in society.
- intrinsic worth (dignity)
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—valuable in itself (to itself).
- monogenist (ism)
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—belief that all human groups, including races, had the same origins.
- moral
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—adjective connoting human culture, ethics, psychology, and studies thereof.
- nominalism
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—philosophical doctrine that the distinguishing marks of a certain type of thing or of all types of things are matters of language and human decision and convention, rather than what actually exists in nature or in the external world.
- natural kind
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—a type of thing that exists on its own in nature, without human invention.
- Philosophy of Race
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—descriptive and normative philosophical inquiry into racial differences and injustice related to them.
- polygenist(ism)
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—belief that human groups, especially races, had different origins.
- phronesis
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—for Aristotle, practical reasoning about how to act.
- racialism
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—belief that there are human races or that humankind is divided into races.
- racism
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—negative assessment of some human races and their members, compared to others.
- species
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—most common division in biological taxonomy; members of a species share its defining traits and can breed amongst themselves but not with members of other species.
- systematics
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—biological naming and classifying living things as individuals and groups, in relation to one another.
- teleology
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—determination or causation by an end goal.
- thumos
-
—(Greek) spiritedness.
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Zack, N. (2018). Ideas of Race in the Canonical History of Philosophy. In: Philosophy of Race. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78729-9_1
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