The study of race and racism is an area of growth in philosophy. The quantity of research published under the banner of ‘the philosophy of race’ is increasing; research monographs and edited collections are appearing in greater numbers, and there is even a noticeable though still lamentably small increase in the number of professional posi- tions being advertised in the philosophy of race. However, one notable feature of this research is how much it focuses (...) upon the racial context of the USA. Most of its active and prominent researchers are based in the USA, nearly all new posts with designated research specialisms in race are at universities in the USA, and most of its key research questions are framed in the racial idiom and social context of the contemporary USA. In many respects, this is a good thing: if the philosophy of race cannot find fertile ground in the USA, there is little hope of it flourishing anywhere. However, this emphasis on the US context may have a negative side too. (shrink)

Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, by Falguni Sheth, SUNY Press, 2009. Events involving the persecution of African‑Americans and other racial groups are normally thought to involve a pre-existing minority being singled out out for persecution. In Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, Falguni Sheth argues that this understanding gets the causal story backwards. In reality, a group that is perceived to pose a political threat has a racial identity imposed upon it by the state during (...) episodes of oppression. On Sheth's account, racial identity is the product of anxiety and panic on the part of the wider society. As she puts it, 'I distinguish between racial markers - skin type, phenotype, physical differences, and signifiers such as 'unruly' behaviors.' The former, in my argument, are not the ground of race, but the marks ascribed to a group that has already become (or is in on the way to becoming) outcasted." This review critically assesses Sheth's argument for her position and her accompanying critique of liberalism. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the pragmatic relevance of race in history. Kant and Hegel's racist development thesis assumes that nonwhite, non-European racial groups are defective practical agents. In response, philosophers have opted to drop race from a theory of history and progress. They posit that denying its pragmatic relevance amounts to anti-racist egalitarianism. I dub this tactic “colorblind cosmopolitanism” and offer grounds for its rejection. Following Du Bois, I ascribe, instead, a pragmatic role to race in (...) history. Namely, Du Bois argues that race is an “instrument of progress” that advances emancipatory struggle. He appeals to the writing of history—or historiography—to cultivate group consciousness of historical memory in order to strengthen intragroup bonds among the racially oppressed, especially black Americans, and create intergroup bonds that reconstruct the republic on the basis of universal ideals. I detail Du Bois's defense of the black struggle for freedom in the wake of the U.S. Civil War to provide a concrete illustration of “spirit” in American history. (shrink)

Philosophers of science widely believe that the hereditarian theory about racial differences in IQ is based on methodological mistakes and confusions involving the concept of heritability. I argue that this "received view" is wrong: methodological criticisms popular among philosophers are seriously misconceived, and the discussion in philosophy of science about these matters is largely disconnected from the real, empirically complex issues debated in science.

his article develops a framework for addressing racial ontologies in transnational perspective. In contrast to simple contextualist accounts, it is argued that a globally engaged metaphysics of race needs to address transnational continuities of racial ontologies. In contrast to unificationist accounts that aim for one globally unified ontology, it is argued that questions about the nature and reality of race do not always have the same answers across national contexts. In order address racial ontologies in global perspective, the (...) article develops a framework that accounts for both continuities and discontinuities by looking beyond the referents of narrowly defined core concepts. By shifting the focus from narrow concepts to richer conceptions of race, racial ontologies become comparable through globally related but nonetheless distinct mappings between conceptions and property relations. The article concludes by showing how this framework can generate novel insights in case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. (shrink)

It is nowadays a dominant opinion in a number of disciplines (anthropology, genetics, psychology, philosophy of science) that the taxonomy of human races does not make much biological sense. My aim is to challenge the arguments that are usually thought to invalidate the biological concept of race. I will try to show that the way “race” was defined by biologists several decades ago (by Dobzhansky and others) is in no way discredited by conceptual criticisms that are now (...) fashionable and widely regarded as cogent. These criticisms often arbitrarily burden the biological category of race with some implausible connotations, which then opens the path for a quick eliminative move. However, when properly understood, the biological notion of race proves remarkably resistant to these deconstructive attempts. Moreover, by analyzing statements of some leading contemporary scholars who support social constructivism about race, I hope to demonstrate that their eliminativist views are actually in conflict with what the best contemporary science tells us about human genetic variation. (shrink)

Two families of mathematical methods lie at the heart of investigating the hierarchical structure of genetic variation in Homo sapiens: /diversity partitioning/, which assesses genetic variation within and among pre-determined groups, and /clustering analysis/, which simultaneously produces clusters and assigns individuals to these “unsupervised” cluster classifications. While mathematically consistent, these two methodologies are understood by many to ground diametrically opposed claims about the reality of human races. Moreover, modeling results are sensitive to assumptions such as preexisting theoretical commitments to certain (...) linguistic, anthropological, and geographic human groups. Thus, models can be perniciously reified. That is, they can be conflated and confused with the world. This fact belies standard realist and antirealist interpretations of “race,” and supports a pluralist conventionalist interpretation. (shrink)

Racial constructionists, anti-naturalists, and anti-realists have challenged users of the biological race concept to provide and defend, from the perspective of biology, biological philosophy, and ethics, a biologically informed concept of race. In this paper, an ontoepistemology of biology is developed. What it is, by this, to be "biological real" and "biologically meaningful" and to represent a "biological natural division" is explained. Early 18th century race concepts are discussed in detail and are shown to be both (...) sensible and not greatly dissimilar to modern concepts. A general biological race concept (GBRC) is developed. It is explained what the GBRC does and does not entail and how this concept unifies the plethora of specific ones, past and present. Other race concepts as developed in the philosophical literature are discussed in relation to the GBRC. The sense in which races are both real and natural is explained. Racial essentialism of the relational sort is shown to be coherent. Next, the GBRC is discussed in relation to anthropological discourse. Traditional human racial classifications are defended from common criticisms: historical incoherence, arbitrariness, cluster discordance, etc. Whether or not these traditional human races could qualify as taxa subspecies – or even species – is considered. It is argued that they could qualify as taxa subspecies by liberal readings of conventional standards. Further, it is pointed out that some species concepts potentially allow certain human populations to be designated as species. It is explained why, by conventional population genetic and statistical standards, genetic differences between major human racial groups are at least moderate. Behavioral genetic differences associated with human races are discussed in general and in specific. The matter of race differences in cognitive ability is briefly considered. Finally, the race concept is defended from various criticisms. First, logical and empirical critiques are dissected. These include: biological scientific, sociological, ontological, onto-epistemological, semantic, and teleological arguments. None are found to have any merit. Second, moral-based arguments are investigated in context to a general ethical frame and are counter-critiqued. Racial inequality, racial nepotism, and the “Racial Worldview" are discussed. What is dubbed the Anti-Racial Worldview is rejected on both empirical and moral grounds. Finally, an area of future investigation – the politics of the destruction of the race concept – is pointed to. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss epistemological limitations relating to the use of ethnoracial categories in biomedical research as devised by the Office of Management and Budget’s institutional guidelines. We argue that the obligation to use ethnoracial categories in genomics research should be abandoned. First, we outline how conceptual imprecision in the definition of ethnoracial categories can generate epistemic uncertainty in medical research and practice. Second, we focus on the use of ethnoracial categories in medical genetics, particularly genomics-based precision medicine, where (...) ethnoracial identity is understood as a proxy for medically relevant differences among individuals. Notably, extensive criticisms have been made already against the genetic interpretation of races, but, nonetheless, the concept of race remains a key element of contemporary genomics. This motivates us to explore possible reasons why such criticisms may have been ineffective in redirecting attention to other (non-race-based) ways of controlling for human variability. We contend that popular arguments against the idea that human races have a genetic basis, though convincing in many respects, are not sufficient to exclude the pragmatic use of race and ethnicity as proxies for genetic variability related to complex phenotypes. Finally, we provide two further arguments to support the idea that ethnoracial categories are unlikely to provide meaningful insights into medical genetics, which implies that even the interpretation of race as a useful tool to stratify disease risk is unwarranted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. I (...) show how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. (shrink)

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead (...) and Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates the semantic externalist conception of Race and Gender concepts put forward in Sally Haslanger's 2012 essay collection "Resisting Reality". I argue that her endorsement of "objective type externalism" limits the options for critique compared to social externalist approaches.

As a response to the question posed in the title, this article presents a critical assessment of how the works of the nationalist–ideological philosophers can be seen as evidence against David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s ideas of race. Hume and Kant have certain ideas about race; if these ideas are true, then there is—and indeed, can be—no African philosophy. But there is African philosophy—that of nationalist–ideological philosophy; therefore, Hume’s and Kant’s ideas about race (...) are incorrect. (shrink)

It is widely known that Black people are significantly more likely to be killed by the police in the United States of America than white people. What is less widely known is that nearly half of all people killed by the police are disabled people. The aim of this paper is to better understand the intersection of racism and ableism in the USA. Contributing to the growing literature at the intersection of philosophy of disability and critical philosophy (...) of race, I argue that theories concerning white supremacy should take more seriously the ways in which it functions as a process and apparatus of making abled and disabled. I conclude by discussing how understanding white supremacy in this manner is a valuable coalitional tool in fights for social justice. (shrink)

In his book, Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable form of Racism, Aidan McGarry gives a powerful analysis of anti-Roma racism in Europe. His aims in the book are to highlight the plight of European Roma and to anal- yse the underlying causes of their persecution. The quandary, as McGarry sees it, is that Roma persecution in Europe has persisted unabated for over six hundred years. As soon as Roma appeared in Europe in the late fourteenth century they were traded as slaves, (...) or targeted by laws calling for assimilation or death. Roma were targeted for mass extermination during the Holocaust, and even now, they face widespread persecution across Europe. Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini, for instance, insists on compiling a “Gypsy Registry” and cleansing Italian neighbour- hoods of Roma camps. The French government targets Roma settlements for demolition and, in defiance of European laws, deports around twenty thousand Roma to other countries every year. Targeted murders of Roma in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Ukraine are encouraged, and ignored. Tabloid newspapers in the UK drum up anti-Roma sentiment. Indeed, the Daily Mail even cite former UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbin’s past attempts to protect Roma from eviction in London as a reason for his unsuitability to become Prime Minister—in modern Britain, compassion for Gypsies is a sign of questionable character. For McGarry, then, this persistence is central to the puzzle of Romaphobia—why does this form of racism remain unchallenged and acceptable? (shrink)

This paper offers both a criticism of and a novel alternative perspective on current ontologies that take race to be something that is either static and wholly evident at one’s birth or preformed prior to it. In it I survey and critically assess six of the most popular conceptions of race, concluding with an outline of my own suggestion for an alternative account. I suggest that race can be best understood in terms of one’s experience of his (...) or her body, one’s interactions with other individuals, and one’s experiences within particular cultures and societies. This embeddedness of human experience has been left out of most discussions of race which tie race to a set of characteristics (either biologically or sociologically defined). To rectify this omission, I articulate what I call the “physiosocial” view of race. This emphasizes the situatedness of human experience, the reciprocal and dynamic nature of the racial identities of individuals and groups. Approaching racial identity in this way entails a union of two historically uncomfortable partners: biological and sociological conceptions of race. If successful, this philosophical stance may illuminate the process of racial self-ascription as well as provide an explanation for the potential changeability of an individual’s racial identity at different times and at different places. (shrink)

The contribution of the data paper publishing paradigm to the knowledge generation and validation processes is becoming substantial and pivotal. In this paper, through the information-processing perspective of Mindsponge Theory, we discuss how the data article publishing system serves as a filtering mechanism for quality control of the increasingly chaotic datasphere. The overemphasis on machine-actionality and technical standards presents some shortcomings and limitations of the data article publishing system, such as the lack of consideration of humanistic values, radical race (...) for big data, and inadequate use of expertise in data evaluation. Without addressing the shortcomings and limitations, the reusability of data will be hindered, and scientific investment to facilitate data sharing will be wasted. Thus, we suggest that the current data paper publishing paradigm needs to be updated with a new philosophy of data. (shrink)

The following paper puts the history of race and colonialism in conversation with the history of the concept of energy. The objective is to understand what a critical decolonial perspective can teach us about the central role that energy plays in western culture, materially and epistemologically. I am interested in how this approach to political, epistemological, and ontological questions demands that we reconceptualize energy to account for the historical particularity of the concept and the phenomena of history and (...) intersubjectivity, which are eschewed in a purely materialistic and quantitative conception of energy. We will see how energy has been complicit in the racialization of black and indigenous bodies, and how the privileged place that the concept of energy has occupied in the canon of western physics has served to obscure the theological, metaphysical, and cultural assumptions that constitute it. (shrink)

Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I (...) contend, however, that the article itself to some degree facilitates this misrepresentation. I analyze in detail several verbal and visual features of the original article that may predispose aspects of its racial interpretation; and, tracing the arguments of one philosopher and one popular science writer, I show how these features are absorbed, transformed into arguments for a biological basis of race, and re-attributed to the original. The essay demonstrates how even slight ambiguities can enable the misappropriation of scientific writing, unintentionally undermining the authors' stated circumspection on the relationship between cluster and race. (shrink)

With few exceptions, the field of Eastern Christian studies has primarily been concerned with historical-critical analysis, hermeneutics, and sociology. For the most part it has not attempted to bring Eastern Christian philosophy into serious engagement with contemporary thought. This volume seeks to redress the matter by bringing the Eastern Christian tradition into a meaningful dialogue with contemporary philosophy. It boasts a diverse group of scholars―specialists in ancient philosophy, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy―who engage with (...) a wide range of pressing issues. Among other things, it addresses such topics as contemporary atheism, the metaphysics of action, religious epistemology, the philosophy of language, bioethics, the philosophy of race, and human rights. In so doing, it aims to introduce contemporary readers to unique perspectives and novel arguments often overlooked by mainstream anglophone philosophy. (shrink)

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations (...) of non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience (...) daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

This is a book review/critical review of Jackson and Depew's _Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century_.

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Daniel Engster, Kelly Gawel, and Andrea Westlund about my 2020 book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. I begin with a statement of my commitment to liberalism. In section two, I defend the value of a distinction between conceptions of persons in the real world and in contract theory to track inequalities in care when indexed to legitimate needs. I argue, as well, that my variety of contract theory supplies the normative content (...) needed to reject the subordination of women of color. Acknowledging the enduring danger of expressive subordination, I emphasize my theory’s compatibility with the full social inclusion of people with disabilities. Section three then defends liberal dependency care’s compatibility with radical critique and transformative change by emphasizing the abstract nature of its core theoretical module. Finally, in section four, I reaffirm conceptual distinctions between autonomy skills, care skills, and a sense of justice by explicating their theoretical roles. In that section, I also embrace Westlund’s insight that theorists of justice need to have skills enabling responsiveness to other perspectives. To this new requirement for actual theorists of justice, I further add that we must attain capacities to engage critically with our society’s norms. Thus, the final section of this article supplements the justificatory module of liberal dependency care, building from the necessary conditions specified as two-level contract theory toward an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for this liberalism’s justificatory module. (shrink)

Kant is regarded as the spokesman of the contemporary declaration of human rights and the forerunner of global citizenship theory. However, this noble image has been questioned by critics for his comment of empirical racial hierarchy stated in the pre-critical period: Kant’s moral law applies only to the white race with the “full personality”. Around the question of whether Kant’s pure moral philosophy was impregnated by his racist view, the defenders of Kant either adopt the negative defense (...) strategy of affirming the transcendental moral philosophy and negating the racial thought, or try to justify the consistency of Kant’s theory from the perspective of his later philosophy of right. The deficiency of these two justifications is that they do not directly deal with the relationship between moral philosophy and race theory. When Kant developed a mature moral theory in the mid-1780s, he also constructed a systemically mature race theory under the guidance of teleology principles to defend the unity of mankind in a different world. This theory can be used as the explanatory basis to prove the universality of Kant’s moral philosophy, which reflects the deep correlation between moral philosophy and race theory. From this perspective, it can not only make up for the lack of defenders and respond to the critics’ doubts, but also portray a consistent egalitarian image of Kant. (shrink)

A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an (...) interpretive duet between Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies. (shrink)

My contribution to this conversation sets out to accomplish two things: First, I offer a definition of epistemic pushback. Epistemic pushback is an expression of epistemic resistance that occurs regularly in classroom discussions that touch our core beliefs, sense of self, politics, or worldv iews. Epistemic pushback is structural: It broadly characterizes a family of cognitive, affective, and verbal tactics that are deployed regularly to dodge the challenging and exhausting chore of engaging topics and questions that scare us. It can (...) take such forms as direct deep hostility, knee jerk skepticism, or silence. Good teaching should not only track the production of knowledge, but also the production of ignorance. There are forms of epistemic pushback that are ignorance producing, so I work with students to cultivate a mindfulness around epistemic pushback by treating it as a ‘shadow text.’ The remainder of the paper explains the nature of shadow texts, and offers suggestions for how to navigate them. (shrink)

Liberalism is often claimed to be at odds with feminism and critical race theory (CRT). This article argues, to the contrary, that Rawlsian liberalism supports the central commitments of both. Section 1 argues that Rawlsian liberalism supports intersectional feminism. Section 2 argues that the same is true of CRT. Section 3 then uses Young’s ‘Five Faces of Oppression’—a classic work widely utilized in feminism and CRT to understand and contest many varieties of oppression—to illustrate how Rawlsian liberalism supports (...) diverse feminist and CRT projects, and why it may be critical to achieve solidarity between feminism, CRT, and Rawlsian liberalism. Finally, Section 4 responds to five objections. (shrink)

Anglophone attention to issues of race and racism, with particular attention to Kant and other members of the German Enlightenment, has long been hampered by a lack of critical editions in English. While this is no longer significantly true for Kant studies, it continues to be the case for many of the most relevant works by Georg Forster and Christoph Meiners. This is a problem for philosophers working exclusively in English, and it is one that is only exacerbated (...) by the field’s general lack of interest in not just the intellectual history of philosophy and its figures, but in analyses published in languages other than English today. Ahistorical, monolinguistic approaches become especially problematic, however, when it comes to the philosophical analysis of race and racism, given the need to approach such topics from multiple angles at once—historical, political, cultural, economic, and legal—a fact that is no less true for scholarship on the figures of the eighteenth century than it is for the study of the present one. My aim in what follows therefore is to fill in a bit of the bigger picture, the specific context within which a writer like Georg Forster and his cohort were working, in order to better frame the kinds of specialised discussions of Kant’s philosophy of race that we find today. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television. We then offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on critical race theory, particularly the idea of the White racial frame. First, we examine the extent to (...) which this Whiteness might simply reflect the predominantly White milieus from which these artefacts arise. Second, we argue that to imagine machines that are intelligent, professional, or powerful is to imagine White machines because the White racial frame ascribes these attributes predominantly to White people. Third, we argue that AI racialised as White allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary. Finally, we examine potential consequences of the racialisation of AI, arguing it could exacerbate bias and misdirect concern. (shrink)

This review examines Burke's phenomenological analysis of normative femininity, examining how femininity is implicated in both historical and present racial violence. It lauds Burke's analysis of the temporality of gendered experience—in the Beauvoirean tradition of feminist phenomenology—but it criticizes Burke for coming up short in the critical aspect of their project. It closes with some methodological reflections about doing effect critical phenomenology.

Well-Being in African Philosophy: Insights for a Global Ethics of Development, edited by Bolaji Bateye, Mahmoud Masaeli, Louise Müller, and Angela Roothaan, explores the notion of well-being in African and intercultural philosophy and its insights into global ethics of development. Drawing from longstanding debates on communitarianism in the context of personhood in African philosophy, as well as those in intercultural philosophy, the diverse contributors present manifold ways to philosophize about well-being from African contexts. Hailing from sub-Saharan (...) Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, they address questions of human well-being related to the major global challenges of our time, such as climate change and socio-economic, gender, and racial inequality in society, education, and organization. This collection, building on the work of African independence philosophers as well as oral traditions from a critical development studies perspective, offers fresh views on well-being, development, and morality, thus contributing to global ethics from an African vantage point. (shrink)

This year’s topic is “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” Different researchers might work on distinct subsets of the six thematic clusters below, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive: (1) Concepts of ‘Race’; (2) Mathematical Modeling of Human History and Population Structure; (3) Data and Technologies of Human Genomics; (4) Biological Reality of Race; (5) Racialized Selves in a Global Context; (6) Pragmatic Consequences of ‘Race Talk’ among Biologists.

In his criticism of my paper on the concept of race (Sesardic, 2010), Adam Hochman raises many issues that deserve further clarification. First, I will comment on Hochman’s claim that I attack a straw man version of racial constructionism. Second, I will try to correct what I see as a distorted historical picture of the debate between racial naturalists and racial constructionists. Third, I will point out the main weaknesses in Hochman’s own defense of constructionism about race. And (...) fourth, I will briefly comment on why I think that Hochman unjustifiably dismisses one of the potential sources of racial differentiation that were suggested in my paper. Before I start, though, a preliminary clarification is in order. Hochman kindly calls my article ‘‘one of the strongest defenses of racial naturalism in recent times’’, which might suggest to the reader that my goal was to offer a full-fledged biological explication of the concept of race. But in fact my ambition was more limited. As I explained: My aim in this paper was not to prove the biological reality of race. Rather, more modestly, I have tried to show that typical attempts to disconnect the concept of race from genetics have too quickly and too uncritically been accepted by many ‘‘race critics’’. (Sesardic, 2010, p. 160; italics added) I will continue defending the same position in this article. (shrink)

In his [Africans are not Black: The Case for Conceptual Liberation], Kwesi Tsri relies extensively on myths and non-fictional narratives to dictate the origin of the racial disparagement of Afro-Americans and Africans from south of the Sahara. Owing to the synonymy between ‘black’ and ‘Africa’ as well as the derogatory symbolism in the former that fuels the latter, Tsri submits the need to disassociate Africans from the concept, ‘black.’ Upon a critical conversation with Tsri’s text however, Chimakonam discerns three (...) flaws. Granted, the objections are salient, I augment herein, one of Chimakonam’s critiques – the exclusion by Tsri, of nonfictional or scientific texts on the race discourse. Whereas I agree with Chimakonam that both the fictional and non-fictional accounts on race are pertinent for intellectual balance in Tsri’s disquisition, I further suggest that in most cases, non-fictional or scientific theories on race are undergirded by the prejudice initiated by mythical and/or fictional narratives. I substantiate my thesis, relying on Karl Popper’s evolutionary epistemology, with 21 st century science admission that human genetic diversity cannot be captured by scientific theories of race. Keywords: Africa, Blackness, Jonathan Chimakonam, Karl Popper, Kwesi Tsri. (shrink)

This article explicates the views on both race and ethnicity of these three prominent Latinx philosophers, compares them (somewhat), and offers some criticisms. Corlett jettisons race as a categorization of groups, but accepts a form of racialization somewhat at odds with this jettisoning. Gracia adopts as a general principle that an account of both ethnicity and race should help us see aspects of reality that would otherwise be obscured; but this is at odds with his regarding the (...) Latin American view of race as more rational than the U.S. version with its “one-drop rule.” The latter has structured the reality of race in the U.S. for African Americans. Alcoff is much more concerned with the phenomenology of race and ethnicity than the other two, and she clearly adds “pan-ethnicity” to the mix of concepts required to understand Latino/a Americans. I argue that she fails to see the agentic and political aspect of black identity in the U.S., and in a sense shares with Gracia a misplaced sense that the mixedness of Latin American racial identity is somehow to be preferred to the more binary U.S. form. (shrink)

One of the many debates in the philosophy of race is whether we should eliminate or conserve discourse, thought, and practices reliant on racial terms and categories (i.e., race-talk). In this paper, I consider this debate in the context of medicine. The recent resurgence in anti-racist activism and the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted philosophers, medical professionals, and the public to (re)consider race, its role in long-standing health disparities, and the utility of race-based medicine. In what (...) follows, I argue that while utility is insufficient for adjudicating permissible uses of race in medicine, eliminativism is neither necessary nor sufficient for dealing with the sort of ills associated with race-based medicine. I, then, use a virtue-based framework to adjudicate morally permissible uses of race in medicine. In doing so, I demonstrate the limitations of eliminativism, offer a decision procedure for determining morally permissible uses of race, and demonstrate that the debate regarding eliminating or preserving race-talk need not depend on conclusive answers to metaphysical questions regarding race. (shrink)

Imperialism rarely receives discussion in mainstream philosophy. In radical philosophy, where imperialism is analyzed with some frequency, European expansion is the paradigm. This essay considers the nature and specificity of American imperialism, especially its racialization structures, diplomatic history, and geographic trajectory, from pre‐twentieth century “Amerasia” to present‐day Eurasia. The essay begins with an account of imperialism generally, one which is couched in language consistent with left‐liberalism but compatible with a more radical discourse. This account is then used throughout (...) the rest of the essay to illumine, through consideration of US foreign policy, structures of American dominion in Latin America, the Pacific, and Asia—and subsequently Eurasia. The overall analytic and geographic portrait offers critical context for both philosophy of race, which tends to be domestically oriented, and just war theory, which tends to ignore wider structures of diplomatic domination. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy (...) which has followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The richness of the term “unsettling” has made it readily employable for phenomenological accounts of racism in philosophy of race literature; yet, the term has been left largely under-theorized. Here, I argue that unsettling encounters can be said to occur when the unfamiliar other has come into contact with the boundary of one’s existential home. For many white people, interracial interactions produce an (often unwarranted) feeling of physical danger, but as I hope to show, this habitual (mis)perception of (...) such encounters is not merely a conditioned response; it also functions to subvert situations that might unsettle white identifies partially constituted by phenomenological demarcations of space along racial lines. Drawing on empirical literature and recent developments in critical phenomenology, I suggest that by exercising habitual, racist gestures and perceptions, white people (mis)perceive ontological threats to their worldview—e.g., a bookish Black student or a masculine gay man—as ontically threatening so as to avoid the kind of work and existential anguish that altering one’s normative expectations would require. (shrink)

This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In (...) this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009). (shrink)

There has been a recent increase in interest in the place of race in the writings of modern canonical European philosophers (e.g., in Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel). However, while it is undoubtedly necessary to undertake such investigations, we should also not stop there, insofar as stopping there does not, in fact, overturn the charge of Eurocentrism or parochialism which has often been leveled against academic philosophy. Because the circle of interlocutors is not being expanded in such an (...) approach, it results in merely asking different questions about the same people (primarily male white European thinkers). Hence the importance of taking into consideration and critically evaluating the response of African philosophers and scientists such as James Africanus Beale Horton (1835 – 1883). (shrink)

In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

Analytic metaphysics has become increasingly extended into the social domain. The aim of this article is critical self-reflection on the challenges of transferring the tools of analytic metaphysics from classical cases such as the very existence of abstract or composed objects to socially-contested phenomena such as gender and race. In reflecting on the status of metaphysics of race, I formulate a polemical hypothesis of misalignment according to which the tools of analytic metaphysics are not suitable for engaging (...) with complex racial phenomena and politics. In addressing this challenge of misalignment, the article sketches a perspective on critical metaphysics of race as interdisciplinary action research. (shrink)

"Philosophy of Happiness: A Critical Introduction" summarizes (a) what philosophy of happiness is, (b) why it should matter to us, (c) what assistance we can draw from philosophy, empiric science, religion, and self-help sources, and (d) why taking an independent approach is both necessary and feasible. -/- The article is in PDF format, 60 pages. The table of contents links directly to the listed captions. Also available in an html version under the phone variant of the (...) referenced philosophy of happiness website. -/- Table of Contents -/- 1. The Definition of Happiness. -/- 2. The Definition of Philosophy of Happiness. -/- 3. Taking Refuge from the Complexity of Happiness. -/- 4. Self-Help Contributions to Philosophy of Happiness. -/- 5. Religious Contributions to Philosophy of Happiness. -/- 6. Philosophical Authorities on Philosophy of Happiness. -/- 7. Happiness Studies by Sciences Beyond Philosophy. -/- 8. Independent Approaches Toward a Philosophy of Happiness. -/- 9. Further Reading. (shrink)

v. 1. Foundations -- v. 2. The mind-body problem -- v. 3. Intentionality -- v. 4. Consciousness.

Critical diversity studies (CDS) can be found within “traditional,” or “established,” university disciplines, such as philosophy, as well as in relatively newer departments of the university, such as African studies departments, women’s and gender studies departments, and disability studies departments. In this article, therefore, I explain why philosophy of disability, an emerging subfield in the discipline of philosophy, should be recognized as an emerging area of CDS also. My discussion in the article situates philosophy of (...) disability in CDS by both distinguishing this new subfield’s claims about disability from the arguments about disability that mainstream philosophers make and identifying the assumptions about social construction and antiessentialism that philosophy of disability shares with other areas of CDS. The discussion is designed to show that a (feminist) philosophy of disability that draws upon the work of Michel Foucault will transform how philosophers understand the situation of disabled people. By drawing upon Foucault, that is, I offer philosophers of disability and other practitioners of CDS a new understanding of disability as an apparatus of power relations. -/- . (shrink)

A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more general elements. Thus, we offer a case (...) study that one cannot offer a comprehensive model of the causal power of racial categories as social constructions without careful attention both to local meanings and more general mechanisms. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing analyses that aim to confront the problem of marked variation. Negatively marked differences are those natural variations that are used to cleave human beings into different categories (e.g., of disablement, of medicalized pathology, of subnormalcy, or of deviance). The problem of marked variation is: Why are some rather than other variations marked as epistemically or culturally significant or as a diagnostic of pathology, and What is the epistemic background that (...) makes these—rather than other variations—marked as subnormal? For Wilson (2018a), critical examination of the problem of marked variation is central to understanding the epistemology of medicalized pathology that made the history of eugenics possible. My aim is to explore the role marked variation plays in eugenic and other problematic classifications and the inferences they appear to license. I pay particular attention to the normative valuations of marked variations, how these valuations affect the inferences that are made by others about those possessing the variation, and how those possessing the variation perceive themselves. In the final sections, I illustrate this by critically discussing three putative kinship conceptions of race. I rely on these to extend the scope of the puzzle of marked variation from the context of historic and current markings of an individual’s variation as disability in the eugenics movement to historic and current markings for assigning putative racial ascriptions to individuals and groups. Lastly, I suggest that the problem of marked variation is a problem that looms over any epistemic account that is dependent upon sorting or classifying. (shrink)