This paper contributes to a growing body of literature focusing on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s account of the mind-body relation. The first aim of this paper is to provide an overview of that literature, bringing together several interpretations of Amo’s account of the mind-body relation and providing a comprehensive overview of where the debate stands so far. Doing so reveals that commentary is split between those who take Amo to adopt a Leibnizian account of pre-established harmony between mind and body (Smith (...) 2015, Emma-Adamah 2015) and those who argue that Amo adopts a theory of occasional causation (Meyns 2019, Walsh 2019). Both views deny that the body is the efficient cause of the mind’s ideas but while the Leibnizian account holds that ideas exist innately in the mind, the occasional causation account maintains that the body is their occasional cause. That is, on this reading of Amo, sensations in the body are the ‘occasion’ on which the mind efficiently causes its own ideas. The second aim of this paper – which promises to take this interpretative debate in a new direction – is to demonstrate that we should in fact attribute to Amo a specific version of occasional causation known as 'concurrentism'. Concurrentism is the view that, while the mind does efficiently cause its own ideas, it can only do so with the assistance (or ‘concurrence’) of God. In other words, on this view, God makes possible the efficient causal activity of the human mind in generating ideas, in response to ‘occasions’ in the body. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, and (...) consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

Race theorists have been unable to reach a consensus regarding the basic historical question, “is ‘race’ modern?” I argue that this is partly because the question itself is ambiguous. There is not really one question that race scholars are answering, but at least six. First, is the concept of race modern? Second, is there a modern concept of race that is distinct from earlier race concepts? Third, are “races” themselves modern? Fourth, are racialized groups modern? Fifth, are the means and (...) methods associated with racialization modern? And sixth, are the meanings attached to racialized traits modern? Because these questions have different answers, the debate about the historical origins of “race” cannot be resolved unless they are distinguished. I will explain the ways in which “race” is and is not modern by answering these questions, thereby offering a resolution to a seemingly intractable problem. (shrink)

Leibniz puts forward an intriguing argument against the moral permissibility of chattel slavery in a text from 1703. This argument has three independent layers or sub-arguments. The first is that slavery violates natural rights. The second is that moral laws such as the principles of equity and piety oppose slavery, or at least severely limit the permissible actions toward slaves. The third and final layer is that slavery can at most be justified if the slave is permanently incapable of conducting (...) herself well. Yet, it is very doubtful that any actual human beings satisfy that description. This paper analyzes and evaluates Leibniz’s argument, which scholars have so far largely neglected. Even though some elements of the argument are not original to Leibniz, it is of considerable importance for the scholarship of early modern philosophy: it sheds light on Leibniz’s views not only on the moral status of slavery itself, but also on moral rights and obligations more generally. (shrink)

The expression “continental rationalism” refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active on the European continent during the latter two thirds of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Rationalism is most often characterized as an epistemological position. On this view, to be a rationalist requires at least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate (...) rather than adventitious, (3) an emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry. While all of the continental rationalists meet one or more of these criteria, this is arguably the consequence of a deeper tie that binds them together—that is, a metaphysical commitment to the reality of substance, and, in particular, to substance as an underlying principle of unity. (shrink)

The genealogy-based classificatory programs of Kant and Darwin are briefly discussed for context. It is detailed how in biology there is no unambiguous term to reference infraspecific-level descent-based divisions. The term lineage population is introduced and defined for analytic purposes as one of a set of inter-fertile divisions of organisms into which members are arranged by propinquity of descent. It is argued that the lineage population concept avoids the ambiguities associated with related biological and anthropological concepts and polysemes such as (...) population, ethnicity, and race. Other terms and concepts, such as form, cline, cluster, geographic population, breeding population, genetic population, breed, species, subspecies, ancestry, geographic ancestry, biogeographic ancestry, ancestral population, ancestry population, natural division, and population lineage, are discussed in relation to this concept. It is concluded that the lineage population concept is a useful analytic tool which describes, in line with the Kantian/Darwinian perspective, an interesting class of biological variation. (shrink)

Diversity and the concept of race are, or should be, central concerns both for the history of philosophy and for our current political reality. Within academic philosophy, these concerns are expressed in the growing demand for minority representation within the canon, which is overwhelmingly white and male, especially in early modern philosophy. Furthermore, until now, historians of philosophy have not spent the time necessary to uncover various designations such as “Negro”, “Moor”, “Ethiopian”, etc., in early modern Europe, and from there (...) to understand how these shaped philosophical reflections on human diversity. In my research, I relate Anton Wilhelm Amo, Europe’s first African Ph.D. in philosophy, to philosophy and religion together with the treatment of human difference in the work of Robert Boyle and his contemporaries. My project aids in addressing the lack of diversity in the philosophical canon and the insufficient historical analysis of various designations of human difference. Human difference, i.e., the early modern interpretation of race, and Amo scholarship are interrelated subjects, as Amo is both a philosopher in Europe and an African native. The one cannot be researched without the other. Thus, my research attempts to elucidate Amo’s philosophical significance and its relation to race and human difference. I begin by give a biographical sketch of Amo, which addresses goals and, where I discuss Amo in relation to religious ideologies, philosophical positions, and the surrounding early modern context. In the following chapter, which also address goals and, I untangle Amo’s critique of Descartes. For Amo, there is an impasse between the mind and sensation because the mind is immaterial, and sensations necessarily need to occur upon something passive and material, which means sensations could only ever be cognized by the mind and through the body. The final chapter, which addresses goal, investigates how the Royal Society, driven by financial incentives and England’s economy, as well as the burgeoning slave trade, played a large role in advancing “scientific” theories of human difference, especially in relation to Africa. That is, the Royal Society essentially propelled natural philosophy into the proto-racist landscape experienced in the early 18th Century, culminating in the application of the ad hoc and non sequitur racist claims given by 18th Century philosophers, e.g., Immanuel Kant and David Hume, and the ousting of Anton Wilhelm Amo. My project contributes to philosophy and the academic community in three ways: philosophical inclusion and diversity, Black history, and the historical ontology of race. It is this intersectional approach to philosophy that, I believe, allows me to contribute to my field in new and interesting ways. Many people believe that philosophy is dying. I believe diverse individuals, like Amo, and diverse ideologies offer breath and life to philosophy. This is because, as Michel de Montaigne explains in the Essays, we learn from the unfamiliar. (shrink)

The Enlightenment is commonly held accountable for the rise of both racial classification and modern scientific racism. Yet this argument sits uneasily alongside the birth of a modern rights language and strong anticolonial perspectives within the same intellectual movement. This article seeks to make sense of this paradox by arguing that one of the contexts in which we can best understand eighteenth-century race concepts is humanity’s place in a transformed history of nature that brought together novel understandings of deep time (...) and a materialist view of reproduction. Analysing the thought of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and Denis Diderot, the article demonstrates that the waning of both the authority of biblical genealogies and ancient environmentalist explanations of human physical diversity left a lacuna in the eighteenth-century human sciences. Buffon and Diderot’s “races” of humanity are not fixed entities, but rather exist in the flux of time. New understandings of heredity and reproduction combined with a time revolution led these Enlightenment thinkers to reconceive humanity’s place in the natural world. The article suggests that while “race” is a biologically incoherent concept, two elements of these Enlightenment thinkers’ anthropology – a materialist understanding of reproduction and humanity’s place in deep time – remain central to how we understand human diversity. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach has been called ‘The Father of Physical Anthropology’ because of his pioneering publications describing human racial variation. He proposed a racial typology consisting of five ‘major varieties/races’ of humanity. Since the 1990s, Londa Schiebinger and other Anglophone scholars have argued that Blumenbach’s writings on race show evidence that he was significantly influenced by nineteenth-century race supremacist beliefs which held Europeans/caucasians to be the highest ranked and most beautiful race. However, these modern authors relied largely on Thomas Bendyshe’s (...) 1865 English translations of Blumenbach’s Latin and German texts. As documented herein, Bendyshe’s publication includes numerous translation errors which form a pattern indicating that he employed two translators. The first translator was consistent with five earlier English translations. The second translator was not consistent with the earlier translators. This second translator also used English terms that denigrated extra-Europeans while adulating Europeans. Furthermore, Bendyshe’s1865 translation regularly used the term ‘beauty’ to translate different Latin words that Blumenbach used to express his nuanced view of aesthetics and structural symmetry. Given the inconsistency and errors in Bendyshe’s 1865 translations, they should not be unquestionably accepted as an accurate reflection of Blumenbach’s views. (shrink)

After a long period of comparative neglect, in the last few decades growing numbers of philosophers have been paying attention to the startling contrast presented between Kant’s universal moral theory, with its inspiring enlightenment ideas of human autonomy, equality and dignity and Kant’s racism. Against Charles Mills, who argues that the way to make Kant consistent is by attributing to him a threshold notion of moral personhood, according to which some races do not qualify for consideration under the categorical imperative, (...) I argue that Kant cannot be made consistent on race, and that rather than trying to make him so, we should use the example of Kant’s racism to tell us something about the nature of racism. I argue that Kant’s own moral philosophy and moral psychology in fact give some materials for thinking about his racism, and about racism. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

Developments in fields as diverse as biotechnology, animal cognition, and computer science have cast serious doubt on the common belief that human beings are unique and that only they should have dignity and basic rights. A movement referred to as ‘new dignitarianism’ has recently reclaimed human dignity to fend off the threats to human uniqueness that it perceives to arise from these developments. This ‘new’ dignitarianism, however, is not new at all. Drawing on a debate between two Enlightenment philosophers, this (...) article shows that dignitarianism has already surfaced in the eighteenth century as the negative image of another movement: naturalism. Building on this historical account, I propose to understand dignitarianism and naturalism as opposing ideal-types on a normative spectrum. Doing so allows us to see a thus-far neglected problem, which I call the Zero-Sum Problem: any gains a concrete theory makes by approximating one ideal-type, it loses by moving away from the other. I end by showing how accepting this fact is a first step to more practically viable theories that attempt to find a middle ground between the two ideal-types. (shrink)

Dugald Stewart claims that conjectural history is ‘the peculiar glory of the latter half of the eighteenth century’. Yet it is hard to see why, in his view, conjectural histories are not merely confabulated just-so stories. This paper examines Stewart's views about the epistemic and moral value of conjectural history.

Philosophical discussions frame the problem of race as either a social or a historical one; race is rarely diagnosed as a problem in philosophy. This article employs African philosophical writings to capture the distinctiveness of philosophical racism. I offer some remarks on the concept of race, distinguish between social and philosophical racism, and set out African diagnoses of Western philosophical racism, before considering possible responses to these diagnoses. I reject a blanket anti-racist prescriptivism and instead urge individual adoption of a (...) research maxim that is responsive to opportunities for philosophical race reform as they arise within any domain of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In this essay, I term the dominant educational paradigm of our time as scientific education and subject it to historical analysis in order to bring its tacit racial, colonial and Eurocentric biases into view. I subsume this cluster of problems under the general heading of “the problem of scientific education”, a problem simultaneously submerged deeply in the invisible background of current education and across its foreground inasmuch as it conditions daily educational practices beyond educators’ awareness. The delicate question to be (...) answered is: enclosed as we are within a scientific framing of our educational system, how can we find an alternative way of looking at this educational system that will help us resolve the problem of colonial, racial and cultural subordinations inherent in its scientific framing? (shrink)

Critics of climate collapse and colonization in the Americas rightly identify the origin of these twin crises in early modern political theologies. They seek to combat these crises with new political theologies of nature that pay greater reverence to “native” peoples’ ecological knowledge. But in doing so, these critics subtly, perhaps unwittingly, recall elements of the colonial power they criticize. I explain why this is the case, examining Bartolomé de Las Casas’s use of naturales in his critiques of Spanish Conquest, (...) and Thomas Harriot’s use of naturall inhabitants in his writing on English colonization to describe “native” Americans. Both authors aimed to promote politico-theological reverence for “native” peoples and their relationships with “nature.” This set into motion a productive form of power operating in modern political theologies. This power works by legitimizing the European-Christian presence in the Americas through their ability to recognize, respect, and protect “native” relationships with “nature.”. (shrink)

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the (...) world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment. (shrink)