People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. Smith demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature’s universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, Smith delves into philosophy’s part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being.
...MoreReview Cristina Malcolmson (2017) Review of "Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy". Archives of Natural History (pp. 181-181).
Review Devin Vartija (2016) Review of "Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 832-833).
Similar Citations
Book
Lefèvre, Wolfgang;
(2001)
Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant: Philosophy and Science in the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000100782/)
Thesis
Lizbeth V. Jacobs;
(2021)
Perspectives on the Origins and Effects of Racial Ideology: Key Arguments in Contemporary Scholarship
(/isis/citation/CBB082161416/)
Book
Attar, Samar;
(2007)
The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB000774263/)
Book
Ina Goy;
(2014)
Kant's Theory of Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB256212882/)
Book
Nolan, Lawrence;
(2011)
Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB001035171/)
Article
Federico Boccaccini;
Anna Marmodoro;
(2017)
Powers, Abilities and Skills in Early Modern Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB647362818/)
Chapter
Daniel Garber;
(2015)
Leibniz’s Transcendental Aesthetic
(/isis/citation/CBB030829514/)
Article
Richard Mark Fincham;
(2015)
Reconciling Leibnizian Monadology and Kantian Criticism
(/isis/citation/CBB087483741/)
Thesis
Christopher D. Willoughby;
(2016)
Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States
(/isis/citation/CBB728296810/)
Book
Finseth, Ian Frederick;
(2009)
Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770--1860
(/isis/citation/CBB001231161/)
Essay Review
Emanuela Scribano;
(2010)
Attorno a Steven Nadler
(/isis/citation/CBB973333595/)
Book
Steven Nadler;
(2008)
The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil
(/isis/citation/CBB685775094/)
Article
Smith, Justin E. H.;
(2013)
“A Series of Generations”: Leibniz on Race
(/isis/citation/CBB001213476/)
Book
Wolloch, Nathaniel;
(2011)
History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001552978/)
Book
Alexander Bevilacqua;
(2018)
The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB201919497/)
Book
Piroska Balogh;
Dezső Gurka;
(2019)
Changes in the Image of Man from the Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism: Philosophical and Scientific Receptions of (physical) Anthropology in the 18-19th Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB052431813/)
Article
Breitenbach, Angela;
(2006)
Mechanical Explanation of Nature and Its Limits in Kant's Critique of Judgment
(/isis/citation/CBB000770748/)
Article
Gerogiorgakis, S.;
(2004)
The Prospects of an Aprioristic Physics in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the Opus Postumum
(/isis/citation/CBB000931338/)
Book
Mensch, Jennifer;
(2013)
Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001213143/)
Article
Gomes, Flávio;
(2012)
A demografia atlântica dos africanos no Rio de Janeiro, séculos XVII, XVIII e XIX: algumas configurações a partir dos registros eclesiásticos
(/isis/citation/CBB001420622/)
Be the first to comment!