As one would expect, Kant believes that there is a tension, and even a conflict, between our bodily humanity and its ethical counterpart: ‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other’ (Anthropology, 185-86 [7:277]). What is more unexpected, however, is that he further claims that this tension can be resolved in what he calls an example of ‘civilised bliss’, namely dinner parties. Dinner parties are, for Kant, part of the ‘highest ethicophysical good’, the ultimate (...) resolution of the conflict between our physical body and our moral powers, which consists in finding the right proportions for the ‘mixture’ between our partly ‘sensuous’ and partly ‘ethicointellectual’ nature. The aim of this paper is not only to explain Kant’s account of the ideal proportions of ethicophysical good in dinner parties, but also, and more importantly, to argue that dinner parties are in fact the ultimate experience for us, human beings. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that Kant's philosophy of biology has crucial implications for our understanding of his philosophy of history, and that overlooking these implications leads to a fundamental misconstruction of his views. More precisely, I will show that Kant's philosophy of history is modelled on his philosophy of biology due to the fact that the development of the human species shares a number of peculiar features with the functioning of organisms, these features entailing important methodological (...) characteristics. From this main claim will follow three further claims: (1) Kant's teleological view of history is not simply based on ethical considerations that have to do with the moral progress of the human species; rather, it stems from his conception of teleology as developed in his philosophy of biology. (2) Kant's philosophy of history allows for the practice of scientific history. In this sense, Kant's view of history is not merely teleological but involves a mechanical (and thus empirical) element. (3) Just as teleology is useful for furthering mechanical accounts of biological phenomena, teleological history is useful for scientific history. (shrink)

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged (...) closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person’s exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes’s mind-body problem, Fanon’s experience of being ‘not-yet human,’ and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy’s most enduring and canonical problems. -/- “Harfouch has written an important book on the intersection of race and the Western construction of the mind-body problem … This book is a significant resource for theorists dealing with race and decolonization issues, but it is more significant for the critique of philosophy itself and the continued teaching of mind-body issues. Readers will need some knowledge of philosophy, but the volume is in general accessible. It should be required reading for scholars of philosophy. Harfouch establishes a logically strong argument and makes a unique contribution to the field.” — CHOICE. (shrink)

This article explores the distinctions among European peoples’ character established in Kant’s anthropology and their connection with his politics. These aspects are neglected relative to the analysis of race between Europeans and non-Europeans, but Kant’s anthropological works portray the people of Mediterranean Europe as not capable of civilization because of the dominance of passion in their faculty of desire, which he ties to ‘Oriental’ influences in blood or government. Kant then superimposes this racialized anthropology over the historical geopolitics of Europe, (...) obscuring the indebtedness of Northern European trade dominance to Mediterranean historical tactics and financial wealth. By relegating the Mediterranean to the margins and dismissing contentious commercial exchange in the region as mere violence spearheaded by North African corsairs, Kant gives us an elitist cosmopolitanism unable to cope with hierarchy and inequality, diminishing its potential for egalitarian global projects today. (shrink)

This article shows that Johann Gottlieb Steeb supported different aspects of Kant's theory of race. Despite the growing research on Kant's racial and biological theory, one finds no mention of Steeb in these interpretations. However, his work is relevant because of his attempt in 1785 to synthesize Kant's preformationist terminology with Blumenbach's epigenetic theory. This article aims at understanding this synthesis. Recent interpreters of Kant presuppose that preformationism excluded epigenesis. But already in 1785 Steeb saw the possibility of integrating Kant's (...) germs into a discourse that was to a large extent dominated by Blumenbach. Steeb's synthesis primarily implied that the concepts of germs and race could be amended to Blumenbach's understanding of human diversity. (shrink)

In the 1787 Transcendental Deduction of the Categories Kant indicates the only possible ways by which one can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects (B166), using analogies between modes of explanation and biological theories about the origin of life. He endorses epigenesis as a model for his system of pure reason (B167). This paper examines various interpretive claims about the meaning of this theory of generation and its significance for Kant’s philosophy (Section 1), (...) showing that, after his Critical shift in perspective, in 1775/77 Kant already combined preformed elements and their purposively oriented formation by natural forces (Section 2). Contrary to the standard view, Kant’s theory of race appears to constitute the background to assess Blumenbach’s later (1799/1781) shift to epigenesis after supporting Haller’s preformism (Section 3). In Section 4, I argue that the ground of affinity between epigenesis and formal idealism rests in tracing the first origin of these conformities: externala posterioriclimate conditions and predisposed germs and dispositions within the generative power of the human body; and externala posterioriexperience and spontaneousa prioriconcepts of its objects, within pure sensory intuiting and pure thinking. In both cases the external empirical conditions would function as occasioning propelling factors affecting internal pre-established forms of generation. (shrink)