We continue our philosophy speaker series next Thursday, 19.01.2023 at 6pm with a talk by Prof Stella Sandford (Kingston University) on “Immanuel Kant’s Natural Taxonomy of ‘Race’”.
The talk will take place in the Dalhousie building, room: Dalhousie 1F18
Immanuel Kant’s natural taxonomy of ‘race’ – Abstract:
This lecture will discuss Immanuel Kant’s writings on ‘race’ and their relation to his critical philosophy. Responding to problems in the natural history of the period, Kant defended an historical conception of the natural genus via his discussions of ‘race’. Refusing the natural distinction between ‘genus’ and ‘species’, Kant’s philosophical determination of the concept of ‘race’ then attempts to introduce, below these, a new terminal category in zoological taxonomy that justified, for him, the positing of significant classificatory differences between the human ‘races’ even if they all belonged to the same natural genus/species. This lecture will explain how Kant attempted to achieve this result, and reflect on the historical consequences of it.
Stella Sandford is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. Her last book, Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants, was published by Bloomsbury in autumn 2022
More about Stella Sandford here.