This is a collection of lecture notes and text summaries from the Diversifying Philosophy course in 2021. It covers texts by various thinkers showcasing how thinking about ethnicity, class and gender became more diverse, starting with Kant and Hegel and moving towards Césaire, Fanon, Beauvoir, Pat...
Diversifying Philosophy
Kant on Race and Africa
Kant distinguishes academic taxonomy and natural taxonomy, with the former intending to
arrange creatures into classes based on similarity; for memorizing’s sake, and the latter
arranging them in classes based on generational similarity; for comprehension’s sake. When
using the latter, if Buffon’s rule that animals which make fertile young belong to the same
genus, all humans in the world would be in the same genus. However, Kant sees deviations
in genetic heritage that cause mixing, which he calls race. He also mentions sports, which
applies to those who keep their traits and do not make hybrids when mixing, mentions
varieties, which maintain their resemblance very often and mentions strains, which cause
hybrids but slowly disappear.
Kant talks about how people with white and black skin come from the same stock but are
different races due to procreating in other areas, and will thus lead to hybrids when mixing.
Here, differences in hair colour, posture, proportion and temperament do not apply since that
is just the result from a strain caused by different types of food, soil and temperature. To
deal with those factors, we develop things which are inherent to those climates, which he
calls germs, but if a development merely involves the size of body parts, he calls those
natural dispositions. This is why evolution resulted in developments which bring us an
advantage over nature: northern people are saller to increase blood flow and keep heart
rates constant, the american’s reddish colour would be a result of atmospheric acid and help
them in warm weather, africans’ black skin colour would have come from iron particles and
evaporated phosphorous, hindus’ yellow colour would have come from the dry heat, brown
haired white people would have come from southern europe, and blonde white people from
the north.
Here, Kant distinguishes 4 races: the white, negro, hunnic and hindu races. He considers
these four to be fundamental because their distinctions are impossible to derive from any
other national make-up.
Then, Kant starts talking about how Africa is still very curious since it hasn’t really been
thoroughly explored yet. Kant lists off “curiosities” about black people,, regarding things like
the way the black tint spreads around the body in the months after birth. Then he asks the
question of where the black colour came from. He dismisses the idea that black was a
punishment from God, since there is no such proof for that and since white could have been
a colour for a curse as well. Kant claims that it is because of the epidermis having vessels
dry up, resulting in a black colour after numbers of generations.
Then, Kant starts talking about mental differences between races which would be the result
of temperature as well. Here, Kant claims superiority of people in temperate climates, and
gives a bunch of ridiculous examples to base his claim that Europeans are the most
intellectual, beautiful and wise.
I think Kant started off quite respectful of other races in this text, being much more moderate
than his contemporaries in dismissing that blackness would be a punishment from God, but
he fucks up everything in the end by making a bunch of baseless claims.
, Peter Park
Introduction
Philosophy courses follow a certain canon, but have to exclude a lot of international
philosophy because of that. Around the 18th century, non-european philosophers started
being excluded because they were deemed too primitive; these people would only have
brought religion to the table. This was a new thing; formerly, people considered philosophy
to have started with Adam, Noah or the Egyptians, but in the late 18th century, people
claimed the Greeks started this.
However, around that time, historians discovered Persian philosophy and started to study it
thoroughly in Europe. Because of that, you may suppose that Asian philosophy is a part of
German thought.
Since ‘the history of the history of philosophy’ was a small field, Park is aware of a mere 3
philosophers who published essays on the exclusion of non-european thought. Halbfass
surveyed philosophical papers and noticed that non-european thought fell out of scope due
to European philosophers having weird criteria for ‘real’ or ‘proper’ philosophy. Bernasconi
came with the “paradox of philosophy’s parochialism”, which asks the question why we claim
universal reason, but are nonetheless so set on localizing philosophy. He considered that it
could be out of racist ideas and attitudes, but he thought he needed better arguments for
that. Park wants to be just like Bernasconi, in that he also approaches problems by
analyzing writing changes, also uncovers racial ideas in order to find their sources and also
tells the history of the history of philosophy.
For Park, the problem started when Kant made the method of a priori construction, which
seemed like the one true system to philosophize with, which meant that non-european
philosophers, who did not work according to that system, had to be excluded. Meanwhile,
Schlegel made a history of philosophy which presented the philosophical systems as
degenerating over time, preferring Oriental philosophy and putting it into the picture
somewhat.
Meiners, Tiedemann and Tennemann started the exclusion, claiming Oriental philosophy
was mere brutish poetry. Later Hegel explicitly excluded Oriental philosophy in order to
defend himself from polemical attacks from theologians; Hegel could show students that the
history of philosophy was developing, not just repeating speculation, which Tholuck argued.
After this controversy, the exclusion of Oriental philosophy was normalized.
The Kantian School and the Consolidation of Modern Historiography of
Philosophy
Reinhold decried the disagreement on what the object of the history of philosophy actually is
so he wanted to give his own definition: philosophy is scientific, as opposed to what is
‘common’, and ‘unordered’. Here, Reinhold considered the history of philosophy as
something different from the various subfields, literature, and intellectual history as a whole.
Reinhold went so far that he wanted to make a canon without any biographical details,
excerpts and reports in order to stimulate thought from students. Park sees this development
as starting a movement in the writing of philosophical history where the focus started to lie
on the content, scope, purpose, types, etc, of the history of philosophy. Due to this
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