This book gathers into one volume the most provocative philosophical writing on race produced by the luminaries of the European Enlightenment. There is no anthology that has so focused itself on exploring through primary texts the alliance between philosophy, anthropology and race. It is an attempt to show, through primary texts on matters of race, the 'dark' sides of the Enlightenment philosophy. This book is an indispensable tool for students and researchers interested in exploring the race-inflected nature of eighteenth-century philosophy and science on the one hand, and the systematics relations between philosophy and anthropology and race, on the other.
Race and the Enlightenment
Description
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Carl von Linne: "Hommo" in the System of Nature. 2. Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon: Biological and Geographical Distribution of Mankind. 3. David Hume: Negroes... naturally inferior to the whites. James Beattie: Response to David Hume. 4. Immanuel Kant: On the Different Races of Man. Immanuel Kant: Of National Characteristics. Immanuel Kant: Physical Geography. 5. The Kant-Herder Controversy. Kant: Review of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Johann Gottfried Herder: Organization of the People of Africa. 6. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: The Degeneration of Races. 7. Entries on: 'Negre' in the Encyclopedia, and 'Negro' in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 8. Thomas Jefferson: The difference is fixed in nature. 9. Georges Leopold Cuvier, Varieties of the Human Species. 10. Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Africa is enveloped in the Dark Mantle of Night. Georg Wilhelm Hegel, On Colonialism. Index.
Author Description
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Bucknell University and is Research Associate at the African Studies Centre, Cambridge University, 1996-8. He is the editor of Blackwell's forthcoming African Philosophy: An Anthology and African Philosophy: A Critical Reader.