Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy - by Andrew Valls (Paperback)

About the Book

An innovative, substantial intervention in critical race theory, this book brings together an impressive roster of thinkers to trace the question of race in modern philosophical inquiry and explore its influence on contemporary philosophy.

Book Synopsis

Is modern philosophy racist? Do such canonical philosophers as Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Spinoza, the British Empiricists, and the German Idealists lend support, if only indirectly, to racist doctrines? Or do their ideas contain the resources to critique or even reject racist theories? An innovative and substantial intervention in critical race theory, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy brings together an impressive roster of thinkers to trace the question of race in modern philosophical inquiry and explore its influence on contemporary philosophy. From Locke's treatment of the issue of slavery and Descartes's silence on the issue to Hegel's philosophy of religion and Nietzsche's "racial profiling," this book illuminates the complex relationship between race and philosophy.

Contributors: Robert Bernasconi, University of Memphis; Anthony Bogues, Brown University; Bernard R. Boxill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Peter Fenves, Northwestern University; Barbara Hall, Georgia State University; Michael H. Hoffheimer, University of Mississippi; Anika Maaza Mann, Morgan State University; Charles W. Mills, University of Illinois, Chicago; Debra Nails, Michigan State University; Richard T. Peterson, Michigan State University; Timothy J. Reiss, New York University; William Uzgalis, Oregon State University; Andrew Valls, Oregon State University

Review Quotes

"Andrew Valls has assembled a first-rate group of experts to examine racism and race-thinking in the history of Western philosophy. This collection raises the current debate over the extent to which racism has distorted our philosophical legacy to a new level of scholarship and sophistication. It immediately becomes the essential and most important reading for anyone entering that dispute."--J. L. A. Garcia, Boston College, author of The Heart of Racism

"The analyses and explorations at the heart of this book are long overdue: they emerge from and contribute substantively to ongoing discussions and critiques of canonical figures of modern ('Western') philosophy with regard to these figures' notions of race and the relevance of and impact on their philosophizing of these notions. Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy is a systematically and thematically focused book on the racial considerations of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche. Unprecedented."--Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., Vanderbilt University

"Valls provides a clear, useful introduction to the issues, after which he and twelve other contributors arraign major figures from Descartes through Nietzsche, usually drawing appropriate nuanced conclusions. Each chapter cites most or all of the significant race-related remarks of the thinker under review. Recommended."--Choice, April 2006

About the Author

Andrew Valls teaches political philosophy at Oregon State University.