Tyler Cowen pointed out this book reprinting 73 academics papers on the Philosophy of Race for the low, low price of $1,185. How much of it sounds of value?
I looked over the 73 titles and then read with interest the Philip Kitcher article from 2007, "Does Race Have a Future?" [link improved] in which this very bright guy, the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, offers his mea culpa for previously proposing a definition of race rather like mine, because everybody -- except what Kitcher calls "ogre naturalists" such as JP Rushton -- knows that race doesn't exist. But Kitcher also slips in a few Eppur si muoves. In that kind of intellectual atmosphere, where even a heavyweight like Kitcher gets browbeaten, how much good work can get done?
The Philosophy of Race
Edited by Paul Taylor
Routledge – 2012 – 1,584 pages
Series: Critical Concepts in Philosophy
Hardback: $1,185.00
December 14th 2011
Volume I: HISTORY
Part 1: Philosophical Historiography
1. Cornel West, ‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism’, Prophesy Deliverance! Towards an Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westminster Press, 1982), pp. 47–68.
2. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Race, Culture, History’ (plenary lecture at Sodertorn University, 28 May 2009), pp. 11–46.
3. David Theo Goldberg, ‘The End(s) of Race’, Postcolonial Studies, 2004, 7, 2, 211–30.
Part 2: Early Figures and Moments
4. Harry Bracken, ‘Philosophy and Racism’, Philosophia, 1978, 8, 2–3, 241–60.
5. Richard Popkin, ‘Hume’s Racism Reconsidered’, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Brill, 1992), pp. 64–75.
6. Meg Armstrong, ‘"The Effects of Blackness": Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1996, 54, 3, 213–36.
7. Bernard Boxill and Thomas E. Hill, ‘Kant and Race’, in Bernard Boxill (ed.), Race and Racism (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 448–71.
8. Patricia Purtschert, ‘On the Limit of Spirit: Hegel’s Racism Revisited’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2010, 36, 9, 1039–51.
9. Tom Jeannot, ‘Marx, Capitalism, and Race’, in Harry Van der Linden (ed.), Democracy, Racism, and Prisons (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2007), pp. 69–92.
Part 3: Late Modern Race Theory in/and the Canon
10. Berel Lang, ‘Heidegger and the Jewish Question: Metaphysical Racism in Silence and Word’, in Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (eds.), Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 205–21.
11. Kathryn Gines, ‘Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism’, in Dan Stone and Richard King (eds.), Imperialism, Slavery, Race, and Genocide: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt (Berghahn, 2007), pp. 38–53.
12. Jonathan Judaken, ‘Sartre on Racism: From Existential Phenomenology to Globalization and "the New Racism"’, in Jonathan Judaken (ed.), Race After Sartre (SUNY Press, 2008), pp. 23–54.
Part 4: Critical Race Theory and the New Canon
13. Diego von Vacano, ‘Race and Political Theory: Lessons from Latin America’, in Jorge Gracia (ed.), Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity (Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 248–66.
14. Howard McGary, ‘Douglass on Racial Assimilation and Racial Institutions’, in Bill E. Lawson and Frank Kirkland (eds.), Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Publishing, 1999), pp. 50–63.
15. Nancy Fraser, ‘Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical "Race" Theory, and the Politics of Culture’, in Morris Dickstein (ed.), The Revival of Pragmatism (Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 157–75.
16. Vivian M. May, ‘Thinking from the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South’, Hypatia, 2004, 19, 2, 74–91.
17. K. A. Appiah, ‘The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race’, Critical Inquiry, 1985, 12, 1, 21–37.
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept [1940] (Transaction Publishers, 1992), pp. 97–103, 114–17, 129–33, 137–40.
19. Frantz Fanon, ‘The Lived Experience of the Black’, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox [1952] (Grove Press, 1967), pp. 78–99.
20. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Racism, Colonialism, and Anonymity: Social Theory and Embodied Agency’, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: A Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Routledge, 1995), pp. 37–67.
Volume II: Racial Being and Knowing
Part 5: What Races Are, What ‘Race’ Means
21. Charles W. Mills, ‘"But What Are You Really?" The Metaphysics of Race’, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 41–66.
22. Lucius Outlaw, ‘Conserve Races? In Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois’, Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 139–62.
23. Ron Mallon, ‘Passing, Traveling, and Reality: Social Construction and the Metaphysics of Race’, Nous, 2004, 38, 644–73.
24. Robin O. Andreasen, ‘A New Perspective on the Race Debate’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1998, XLIX, 2, 199–225.
25. Philip Kitcher, ‘Does "Race" have a Future?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2007, 35, 4, 293–317.
26. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Blackwell, 1993), pp. 80–9.
27. S. Haslanger, ‘Language, Politics and "the Folk": Looking for "the Meaning" of "Race"’, The Monist, 2010, 93, 2, 169–87.
28. Joshua Glasgow, Julie L. Shulman, and Enrique G. Covarrubias, ‘The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and its Relation to Racial Attitudes: A New Approach’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2009, 9, 1–2, 15–38.
Part 6: What Racial Identities Are
29. Linda Martín-Alcoff, ‘Philosophy and Racial Identity’, Philosophy Today, 1997, 41, 1, 67–76.
30. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Synthesis: For Racial Identities’, Color Conscious (Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 75–105.
31. Judith Butler, ‘Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge’, Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993), pp. 167–86.
32. Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2004), pp. 84–7, 112–15.
Part 7: Power, Knowledge, Self-Knowledge, and Experience
33. Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 11–38.
34. Anika Maaza Mann, ‘Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory’, in Kathryn Gines, Donna Dale-Marcano, and Maria del Guadelupe Davidson, Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010), pp. 105–20.
35. Shannon Sullivan, ‘Ignorance and Habit’, Revealing Whiteness (University of Indiana Press, 2006), pp. 17–44.
36. Ned Block, ‘How Heritability Misleads About Race’, Boston Review, 1996, 20, 6, 30–35.
37. Michael Root, ‘The Problem of Race in Medicine’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2001, 31, 1, 20–39.
38. Ronald Sundstrom, ‘Race and Place: Social Space in the Production of Human Kinds’, Philosophy and Geography, 2003, 6, 1, 83–95.
Volume III: Race-ing Beauty, Goodness, and Right
Part 8: Racism
39. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Racisms’, in D. T. Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 3–17.
40. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Racialism, Racism, Racialists, Racists’, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 67–77.
41. J. L. A. Garcia, ‘The Heart of Racism’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 1996, 2, 5–45.
42. Tommie Shelby, ‘Is Racism in the Heart?’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2002, 33, 411–20.
43. L. Faucher and E. Machery, ‘Racism: Against Jorge Garcia’s Moral and Psychological Monism’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2009, 39, 1, 41–62.
44. Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2010, 7, 2, 205–16.
Part 9: Race, the Right, and the Good
45. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 1–19.
46. Anna Stubblefield, ‘Races as Families’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2001, 32, 1, 99–112.
47. L. Blum, ‘Three Kinds of Race-Related Solidarity’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2007, 38, 53–72.
48. Linda Martín Alcoff, ‘Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary’, Journal of Ethics, 2003, 7, 1, 5–27.
49. Howard McGary, ‘Psychological Violence, Physical Violence, and Racial Oppression’, in Lewis R. Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (Routledge, 1996), pp. 263–72.
50. Samantha Vice, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2010, 41, 3, 323–42.
Part 10: Selected Issues in Racial Politics
51. Richard Wasserstrom, ‘Preferential Treatment, Color-Blindness, and the Evils of Racism and Racial Discrimination’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1987, 61, 1, 27–42.
52. Howard McGary, ‘Achieving Democratic Equality: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Reparations’, Journal of Ethics, 2003, 7, 1, 93–113.
53. Angela Y. Davis, ‘Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition’, in Tommy L. Lott (ed.), A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 360–9.
54. Glen Coulthard, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the "Politics of Recognition"’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2007, 6, 4, 437–60.
Part 11: Aesthetics
55. Monique Roelofs, ‘Racialization as an Aesthetic Production: What Does the Aesthetic Do for Whiteness and Blackness and Vice Versa?’, in George Yancy (ed.), White on White/Black on Black (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 83–124.
56. Dan Flory, ‘Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2006, 64, 1, 67–79.
57. Mariana Ortega, ‘Othering the Other: The Spectacle of Katrina for our Racial Entertainment Pleasure’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 2009, 2.
58. Robert Gooding-Williams, ‘Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, Astaire’, Look, a Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (Routledge, 2006), pp. 43–68.
59. Falguni A. Sheth, ‘The Hijab and the Sari: The Strange and the Sexy Between Colonialism and Global Capitalism’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 2009, 2.
Volume IV: Intersections and Positions
Part 12: Intersectionality
60. Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality, Citizenship and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2007, 10, 4, 561–74.
61. Patricia Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation’, Hypatia, 1998, 13, 3, 62–82.
62. Jorge J. E. Gracia, ‘The Nature of Ethnicity with Special Reference to Hispanic/Latino Identity’, Public Affairs Quarterly, 1999, 13, 1, 25–42.
63. Ladelle McWhorter, ‘Sex, Race, and Biopower: A Foucauldian Genealogy’, Hypatia, 2004, 19, 3, 38–62.
64. Stuart Hall, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980), pp. 305–45.
65. Étienne Balibar, ‘Uprisings in the Banlieues’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 2007, 14, 1, 47–71.
Part 13: Mapping Racial Imaginaries: Inventing the Other
66. Edward Said, ‘Introduction to Orientalism’, in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (eds.), The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2000), pp. 67–74, 78–81, 90–3.
67. David Haekwon Kim, ‘Orientalism and America Enlarged’, Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies, 2003, 2, 2, 30–4.
68. V. Y. Mudimbe, ‘Discourse of Power and Knowledge of Otherness’, The Invention of Africa (Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23.
69. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 41, 56–9, 73–5, 80–90, 98–102.
70. David Theo. Goldberg, ‘Racial Europeanization’, Ethnic & Racial Studies, 2006, 29, 2, 331–64.
71. Nadia Abu El-Haj, ‘Racial Palestinianization and the Janus-Faced Nature of the Israeli State’, Patterns of Prejudice, 2010, 44, 1, 27–41.
Part 14: Positioning Critical Identities: Inventing Self and Community
72. Sonia Sikka, ‘In What Sense are Dalits Black?’ (presentation to ‘Beyond the White–Black Binary’, conference held at Pennsylvania State University, 12 November 2010).
73. Linda Martín Alcoff, ‘Mestizo Identity’, in Naomi Zack (ed.), American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 257–78.
Posts
37 comments:
It's just pricing bots fighting each other on Amazon; you only have to sell one or two such books to eek out a profit. Don't think too hard about it.
A lot of it seems to be about racism, not race.
Gee, it's a nice long one. You must get a lot for your money with that, huh?
Kitcher's 2007 article isn't available for free. So, anybody care to post his definition of race? (My blind prediction: that it was not as much like Steve Sailer's as he thinks it was, that it was along the lines of "ancestral clade.")
I don't want to live in the same society as these people.
Seems like one could just type "Race is a social construct" into google and save a bunch of money.
Can't wait till they have to get real jobs
A perhaps related excerpt from a post at Mangan's: Only 40 to 45% of science journal articles are ever even cited. I can imagine it is less than that for papers in the social sciences. Ahem.
Is there even ONE essay that doesn't fundamentally divide the world and theories about the world as being Bad Whitey versus Good Blacky/Good "people of color"?
I'll bet not one.
How's that for diversity (of opinion).
Kitcher's 2007 article isn't available for free.
The very first hit in Google:
web.mit.edu/writing/2009/June/Does_Race_Have_a_Future.pdf
"The notion of race is thus that of an inbred lineage ... That notion is available for generating infraspecific units within any species, including Homo sapiens. About a decade ago, I proposed that this was the way to make sense of
race as a biological category."
It's just pricing bots fighting each other on Amazon; you only have to sell one or two such books to eek out a profit. Don't think too hard about it.
The high price is listed on the publisher's site. It's slightly cheaper on Amazon.
Anonymous said:It's just pricing bots fighting each other on Amazon; you only have to sell one or two such books to eek out a profit. Don't think too hard about it.
The high price is listed on the publisher's site. It's slightly cheaper on Amazon.
.................................................................................
This modern classic is likely priced so high because institutional buyers purchase things with other people's money. University libraries pay dearly for all kinds of overpriced crap that no one else wants.
-The Judean People's Front
The first thing that came to mind when I saw this post was the old joke that an audit of the pentagon's bar tab is sure to reveal a few $300 screwdrivers.
-The Judean People's Front
Amazon offers a 18% discount. $976.86. Pretty good deal.
(My blind prediction: that it was not as much like Steve Sailer's as he thinks it was, that it was along the lines of "ancestral clade.")
Or not.
I noticed that one lecture was held at Sodertorn, Sweden. It's kind of our equivalent of your Oberlin. The president of Sodertorn has written a publication on how textbooks in physics are biased in favor of men. For instance she quotes one that mentions that Mars is named after the Roman warrior god. What girl would ever care for physics after hearing that?
The other books in the series have similar prices. As some of the other posters suggest, they're probably ripping off institutional libraries. I recall reading journals were quite expensive for a library as well.
This book appears to be a few hundred pages of unadulterated nonsense. Unfortunately it is precisely bilge like this that shapes the opinions and worldviews of otherwise intelligent people. I think that the majority of people just dont realize yet that just because something is in print or on TV doesnt mean that it is well intentioned or even factually correct. (actually it took me a pretty long time to learn this as well. Its pretty traumatic realizing that your entire worldview that you have grown up in is pretty much a fraud and a manipulative swindle)
Didn't appear to be a single instance of scientific inquiry about genetics and race. It was all about citing what Heidegger or Hannah Arendt or Spike Lee had to say about race.
Now I'm not saying that my 4 years studying philosophy was a complete waste BUT....at some point (the day I took up my roommate suggestion that I read Konrad Lorenz' "On Aggression" and Tinbergen etc.) I realized that I had been shortchanged. What does Heidegger have to say about race that makes him worth listening to? Or Arendt? They aren't Natural Scientists and even if they were, much water has flowed under the bridge since they lived and breathed. This is precisely why I didn't go on to grad school in the humanities and decided to get another bachelors but this time in the a hard science.
Anything by Cornell West is worth over 1,000 bucks. Even his rap recordings. Lol!
The great thing about the former Soviet Union was that the propaganda was free.
It is an injustice inherent to our system of capitalism that only the elites can afford our propaganda.
It costs alot to be properly ill-informed.
Kitcher is a heavyweight?
You wouldn't know it by reading his article, or indeed anything he has had to say about the concept of race.
His argument in this article is impressively weak. It really amounts to little more than the assertion that we can't talk about race among human beings because it's dangerous. This is so even if it is perfectly legitimate to talk about races of other species under the same set of biological facts.
Wow, we really needed some deep philosophical thinking for that breathless insight. I'm sure that if Kant is turning green in his grave, it's from envy.
One reason the civic conscious like public libraries and require universities to have libraries is to funnel money to select authors, newspapers, and thinkers.
I keep wondering why the kiddos today need paper textbooks? But the conclusion I reach is that the textbook is the way the system can make money, it has nothing to do with what the best way to deliver a string of characters and maybe so diagrams and pictures is.
Every one of these people except West can be cured by spending one year inside a re-education camp, say, NE D.C. or Detroit.
"Kitcher doesn't exist"
- Race
I offered this advice before but I'll repeat it again.
Steve Sailer - you should publish a selection of his old columns as a Kindle book. Cochran and Harpending published a bunch of their old blog posts as a Kindle book called West Hunter (the same name as their blog). The relevant fact is - I bought that Kindle book. It didn't cost much and I didn't have to drive to a book store or wait for UPS. This is the ideal medium for impulse purchasing.
The 'Blogs to Books' route seems painless. Ann Coulter writes a column once a week. She periodically binds together about twenty of them and has them published. This is a relatively simple way to create a book on public policy topics. But it still requires dealing with a traditional publisher with their proofreaders and typesetters. But it also requires a book tour. Most authors just aren't magnetic enough to merit five minutes on 'Morning Joe' much less 'Jay Leno'.
But a Kindle book can be launched effortlessly.
Last year I would have said that a Kindle was just another techie fad like 3D. I had a real Kindle and I had tried to read some books on it but it was a miserable experience. But then I got a 10" Google Nexus tablet. The Nexus has very high resolution and a large reading surface.
Coulter's books cost about $18 in hardback, $12 in paperback and $9 in Kindle. 'West Hunter' sells for only $4 as a Kindle book. That's less than a magazine. You could put out a book on education and sell it for $5. Or race, or several other topics.
I was considering to do this myself before I decided to make movies instead.
Albertosaurus
Anonymous BB753 said..."Anything by Cornell West is worth over 1,000 bucks. Even his rap recordings. Lol!"
I had a girlfriend about 15 or so years ago that really wanted me to read Cornell West. She was an extremely attractive tall blonde (from Norway but lived in the US since she was 10 or so). She was extremely intelligent. I met her when we were attending the same top 10 bschool (she was far brighter than I was).
So I read "Race Matters". It was complete gibberish and, after much suffering, I managed to finish. The "arguments" in the book consisted of him making one relatively minor assertion and from that drawing sweeping conclusions about society: A=B and B=C therefore the whole alphabet is racist.
The only black people she had ever met went to Exeter or Princeton with her. She honestly thought rap videos were meant to be parodies of how whites viewed blacks. I didn't bother trying to convert her.
That's what we're up against.
Wildly OT, but might be an interesting read to Steveites:
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/identity_politics_is_killing_college_life/14066#.UkXdlGTF0Qg
To put how overpriced that book is in context note you can purchase an entry level Fart Bomb Bag for only $2.99.
I always wonder about books like this: Does anybody actually read them? Oh, I know they are "read," sort of, by like-minded academics looking for impressive-sounding articles they can cite in their own work. But does anybody actually sit down and read this drivel for its own sake? Does anybody pick up a book like this and kick back with a glass of wine for a pleasant evening of intellectual stimulation?
How did we get to the point where we pay people to write things that nobody ever really reads? I don't mean things that are only read by highly-trained specialists — average readers would be baffled by the intricacies of chemical engineering, but I have no doubt that actual chemical engineers sit down and actually *read* headache-inducing stuff that is relevant to their discipline. I am fairly certain that nobody will ever read most of the essays in a spirit of serious inquiry.
Well, at least they do potential buyers a favor and list Cornell West first. If he's who they lead with, how can anyone possibly think this will be anything other than PC fluff?
Re, Wes: There are plenty of essays in this collection in third-rate specialist journals that few people who are not leftist philosophers of race would read; but Part 5 (the part with Kitcher) appears to me to have several essays in top philosophy journals by respected philosophers.
I haven't read any of them, but (as a philosopher myself) given the time I would enjoy reading the Mallon, Andreasen, Kitcher, Haslanger, and Glasgow et al. I might after I have tenure and feel more free to write about these kinds of topics. And yes, I would read them in the spirit of serious inquiry. No doubt I would find much to disagree with in their essays, but these are serious philosophers and smart people, even if their ideological blinders are different from my own.
A book on something that does not exist!
No essays by Nevan Sesardic? Sounds like a rather one sided take on the subject.
http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/publications.html
Wes,
I was a grad student in compsci at a top school in the US. The profs there were from MIT, IIT, Stanford, Technion, Cambridge. Grad students were from MIT, Technion, Harvard, etc. My research involved an arcane theory and proving certain narrow mathematical results. In this sub sub specialty, one result was a really big deal; every grad student could cite it. This result was published in a book written by the two Israeli authors who proved the result. This result was on page 11.
I bought the book to understand the proof, and to learn this subject better. Instead I learned that *no one* in my field in any CS dept in any country (other than the two authors) had ever read the book. That's why no one cited anything past page 11.
If it is that bad in cs, it is beyond terrible in humanities.
Jules, let me second that. Nevan Sesardic's articles are must-reads for anybody interested in the scientific reality of HBD. But of even greater importance to HBD is the philosopher Michael E. Levin's luminous masterpiece from 1997, Why Race Matters. (Not to be confused with the similarly-titled piece of culture-bolshevik propaganda by Cornel West.) Levin not only exhaustively documents the global persistence of black cognitive and social dysfunctions, he rigorously demonstrates that a hereditary origin is the overwhelmingly probable explanation for their existence and robustness.
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