Racism and Philosophy

Front Cover
Susan E. Babbitt, Sue Campbell
Cornell University Press, 1999 - Philosophy - 295 pages

By definitively establishing that racism has broad implications for how the entire field of philosophy is practiced--and by whom--this powerful and convincing book puts all members of the discipline on notice that racism concerns them. It simultaneously demonstrates to race theorists the significance of philosophy for their work.A distinguished cast of authors takes a stand on the importance of race, focusing on the insights that analyses of race and racism can make to philosophy--not just to ethics and political philosophy but also to the more abstract debates of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Contemporary philosophy, the authors argue, continues to evade racism and, as a result, often helps to promote it. At the same time, anti-racist theorists in many disciplines regularly draw on crucial notions of objectivity, rationality, agency, individualism, and truth without adequate knowledge of philosophical analyses of these very concepts. Racism and Philosophy demonstrates the impossibility of talking thoughtfully about race without recourse to philosophy. Written to engage readers with a wide variety of interests, this is an essential book for all theorists of race and for all philosophers.

 

Contents

The Racial Polity
13
Fanon Philosophy and Racism
32
On Race and Philosophy
50
Moral Asymmetries in Racism
79
Paradigms and Moral Appraisal A Response to Blum
98
Sweeping Out Africa with Mother Europes
124
Lord Lugard and
157
Mixing Love and Equality
189
Race and the Labor of Identity
202
Dominant Identities and Settled Expectations
216
Moral Risk and Dark Waters
235
Notes
255
Bibliography
277
Contributors
289
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About the author (1999)

Susan E. Babbitt is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Development Studies, and Faculty of Education, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and author of Artless Integrity: Moral Imagination, Reasons, and Stories and Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity and Moral Imagination. Sue Campbell was Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Gender and Women's Studies at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and author of Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings, also from Cornell.

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