A genealogy of the English word racism shows that its dominant sense was shaped by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu around 1940 in order to establish a broad consensus against a narrow form of antisemitism found among some anthropologists in Nazi Germany. Their strategy, which was to challenge the biological concept of race on which racism, on their account, was said to be parasitic was subsequently adopted by UNESCO in 1950 and is still advocated by many today. But (...) this approach was not formulated to address anti-black racism. The limitations of this strategy were quickly exposed by black thinkers such as Oliver Cromwell Cox and Frantz Fanon. They understood that the problem was a form of systemic racism that could not be separated from the economic inequalities produced by slavery and colonialism. It could not be reduced to a system of thought open to scientific refutation: the problem had been misdiagnosed from the outset. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1996) has exerted a profound influence on 20th-century continental philosophy. This anthology, including Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years, provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays presented here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction and (...) notes. This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

Pure nature, the nature that we distinguish from grace, spirit, nurture, society, history, culture, and the supernatural is an abstract fiction. A genealogy of the idea of pure nature reveals its source in the problematic theological idea of a purely human nature. But it was subsequently transformed and expanded by Rousseau into the idea of a state of nature from which all else derives. This all-encompassing nature stifles thought by dehistoricizing. Adorno’s “The Idea of a Natural History” and Sartre’s offer (...) a dialectical approach that returns us to the concrete. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 into an East Prussian Jewish family. In 1933 she fled the Nazi regime and after brief stays in Prague and Geneva she found a temporary home in Paris. In 1941 she succeeded in gaining entry to the United States, where after ten years she became a citizen. Arendt had short‐term positions at a number of universities, but was most closely identified with the New School for Social Research in New York, where she was professor (...) of Political Philosophy at the time of her death in 1975. Much of her most important work attempted either to address the anti‐Semitism that had forced her to leave Europe or to celebrate the political ideals of the United States that had enabled her to find refuge there. In the course of exploring these issues she presented a synoptic view of the Western tradition of political thought from the time of the early Greeks to her own day. (shrink)

Hegel called world history a court of judgement, a world court, and in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History he took Africans before that court and found them to be barbaric, cannibalistic, preoccupied with fetishes, without history, and without any consciousness of freedom. -/- In this paper, after rehearsing some of the more familiar objections to Hegel's verdict against Africa, I turn the tables and put Hegel on trial. More specifically, given that much of Hegel's account is directed (...) against the Ashanti, I will use what is known about them and especially what Hegel either did know or should have known, to take him before the court of the Ashanti, where the use of evidence can be interrogated. The results of this examination render all the more pressing the need to give an account of how Hegel applied his system of justice to Africa, which I attempt to do in the second part of the paper. In the third part, I return to the interpretation of Hegel's statement about Africa as unhistorical and, having restored it to its context in Hegel's system, show its. (shrink)

These essays provoke new responses to the work of the eminent French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas through an analysis of how the problematics of reading, deconstruction, feminism, and psychotherapy complicate and deepen Levinas's account of ...

Emmanuel Levinas is now widely recognised alongside Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as one of the most important Continental philosophers of the twentieth century. His abiding concern was the primacy of the ethical relation to the other person and his central thesis was that ethics is first philosophy. His work has also had a profound impact on a number of fields outside philosophy such as theology, Jewish studies, literature and cultural theory, psychotherapy, sociology, political theory, international relations theory and critical legal (...) theory. This volume, first published in 2002, contains overviews of Levinas's contribution in a number of fields, and includes detailed discussions of his early and late work, his relation to Judaism and talmudic commentary, and his contributions to aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

There is a growing recognition of Levinas's importance. It can in part be attributed to an increasing concern that twentieth-century continental philosophy seems to have no place for ethics. In making ethics fundamental to philosophy, rather than a problem to which we might one day return, Levinas transforms continental thought. The book brings together some of the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas, in three different areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy, and Levinas's relation to other philosophers. It (...) includes a newly translated paper by Levinas on suffering, and a specially commissioned interview. (shrink)

This volume provides an introduction to the concept of race within philosophy. It gives an overview of the most important contributions by continental philosophers to the understanding or race as well as presenting a general review of recent philosophical discussions.

This volume explores some of the more important of Hans-Georg Gadamer's extensive writings on art and literature. The principal text included is 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', Gadamer's most sustained treatment of philosophical aesthetics. The eleven other essays focus particularly on the challenge issued by modern painting and literature to our customary ideas of art, and in turn revitalize our understanding of it. Gadamer demonstrates the continuing importance of such concepts as imitation, truth, symbol, and play for our appreciation of (...) contemporary art, and thereby establishes its continuity with the Western tradition. The essays here are not technical and are readily accessible to the beginning student and the general reader. The collection as a whole serves to illustrate the practice of hermeneutics and to introduce Gadamer's thought. Robert Bernasconi provides an introduction clarifying the central aims of the essays and their relations to Gadamer's major work, Truth and Method, and to the philosophy of art since Kant. A bibliography of Gadamer's writings available in English is also included. (shrink)

Attention to the role of phenomenology in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is fundamental to an appreciation of the book’s progressive structure. And it is through an appreciation of this structure that it becomes apparent that the book’s engagement with phenomenology amounts to an enrichment, not a critique, of existential phenomenology, although the latter might appear to be the case at first sight, given Fanon’s rejection of certain aspects of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus.” This is demonstrated through an examination (...) of Fanon’s references to Sartre, Günther Anders, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the book’s final crucial pages on temporality. His largely neglected relation to Karl Jaspers and the concept of historicity is also explored. (shrink)

Abstract The phenomenological approach to racialization needs to be supplemented by a hermeneutics that examines the history of the various categories in terms of which people see and have seen race. An investigation of this kind suggests that instead of the rigid essentialism that is normally associated with the history of racism, race predominantly operates as a border concept, that is to say, a dynamic fluid concept whose core lies not at the center but at its edges. I illustrate this (...) by an examination of the history of the distinctions between the races as it is revealed in legal, scientific, and philosophical sources. I focus especially on racial distinctions in the United States and on the way that the impact of miscegenation was negotiated leading to the so-called one-drop rule. (shrink)

Robert Bernasconi explores in the context of Heidegger's thought a number of questions of far-reaching concern: what is the role of literary examples within philosophy? Is art dead? What is the relation of art to nature? Is there a place for the idea of a "people" in art and literary theory, and in philosophy? Is the history of philosophy to be written as a narrative? What is the status of ethics within philosophy? What place does philosophy give to (...) praxis? What is the place today of the belief in the nobility of the philosophical life? What is the relation of politics to thought? Reflecting a dominant concern of recent Heidegger scholarship, the focal point of a number of the essays is the relation of Heidegger's own politics to his thought. In addition to this examination of what appears to compromise Heidegger's philosophy, Bernasconi explores its relation to the further possibilities which that thought has opened in the writings of Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, and Derrida. (shrink)

Situating existentialism within the history of ideas, it features new readings on the most influential works in the existential canon, exploring their formative contexts and the cultural dialogues of which they were a part.

What is at stake in identifying some actions or speech acts as racist as opposed to regarding them as “merely” xenophobic? If we understand racism as a system, how does this impact the way we address the distinction between the terms racism and xenophobia? My attempt to address these questions is guided by two observations drawn from the genealogy of the term racism. First, in the English language, the word was initially a synonym for Nazi anti-Semitism. The strategies to combat (...) racism developed by UNESCO under the influence of Ashley Montagu and other followers of Franz Boas were set by the idea that what had to be opposed was primarily a biologically based racial ideology. However, the attempt to apply this model to the United States was problematized by Oliver Cromwell Cox already in the early 1940s, just as the application of this model to colonialism was opposed by Sartre and Fanon. Secondly, whereas race prejudice had at one time been thought of as natural, as xenophobia still tends to be today, what is called racism in English was from the outset thought of as acquired and blameworthy. As a result of this and other differences, the strategies needed to address racism and xenophobia are fundamentally different. (shrink)

Heidegger already recognized in the 1920s the difficulties facing a phenomenology of religion, but the problems are greatly multiplied once one recognizes that many of the so-called religions were constituted as such only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that the "invention" of these religions was according to an idea of religion shaped by Christianity. By investigating the incompatible attempts of Kant and Hegel to negotiate that idea, I identify the genealogy of the double bind whereby today (...) it appears that one is faced with a choice between two violences: the violence of imposing the word religion on practices that do not readily follow the model of the Christian religion and the violence of refusing the word to non-Christian religions. (shrink)

In 1934 Heidegger offered an account of what a Volk is in terms of the existential analytic of Dasein set out in Being and Time , but soon after he abandoned this framework as he began the task of overcoming metaphysics. Integral to this new task was a confrontation with the racial policies not just of the Nazis but also of the Allies because he believed that the Western philosophical tradition was deeply implicated in these policies. Against this background, this (...) paper explores Heidegger's attempts—hitherto unrecognized—in the late 1930s to sketch another way of thinking what his contemporaries called "race" using the conceptual resources he had introduced in "The Origin of the Work of Art." The paper also includes some criticisms of Emmanuel Faye's recent study, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. (shrink)

This study is not an attempt to render an account of Heidegger's history of Being; that history is not a story and cannot be retold as one. This book is concerned with the insight that introduces us to the history of Being and the transformation in our re.

Robert Bernasconi explores in the context of Heidegger's thought a number of questions of far-reaching concern: what is the role of literary examples within philosophy? Is art dead? What is the relation of art to nature? Is there a place for the idea of a "people" in art and literary theory, and in philosophy? Is the history of philosophy to be written as a narrative? What is the status of ethics within philosophy? What place does philosophy give to (...) praxis? What is the place today of the belief in the nobility of the philosophical life? What is the relation of politics to thought? Reflecting a dominant concern of recent Heidegger scholarship, the focal point of a number of the essays is the relation of Heidegger's own politics to his thought. In addition to this examination of what appears to compromise Heidegger's philosophy, Bernasconi explores its relation to the further possibilities which that thought has opened in the writings of Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, and Derrida. (shrink)

At the beginning of 1945, Sartre made his first visit to the United States. It proved an important moment for him. According to Annie Cohen-Solal, it marked the beginning of his concern with political struggle: “It is far from home, far from his daily reality and his socio-historical connivances, that his first endorsement of a purely social cause takes place.” The cause was that of African-Americans. On his return to France, Sartre described for Le Figaro how shocked he was by (...) the indifference shown to Black people by White Americans, both in the South and the North. Racism permeated America. It was to be found not only in segregation or in the way Blacks were consigned to the most menial jobs. It was also in the most commonplace experience of how Whites passed Blacks on the streets. (shrink)

This volume provides an indispensable critical introduction to new perspectives on thinking about race and racism.

'I too was superfluous' -- 'Outside, in the world, among others' -- 'Hell is other people' -- 'He is playing at being a waiter in a café' -- 'In war there are no innocent victims' -- 'I am obliged to want others to have freedom' -- 'The authentic Jew makes himself a Jew' -- 'The eyes of the least favoured' -- 'A future more or less blocked off' -- 'Man is violent'.