Online research in philosophy

From Locke' treatment of the issue of slavery and Descartes' silence on the issue to Hegel' philosophy of religion and Nietzsche' "racial profiling," this book ...

Investigating the meaning of race and racism, the eighteen superb essays in this book not only explore the nature of these controversial ideas but also promote ...

The Right has a long history of questioning the importance of race analysis. Recently, the conceptual and political status of race has come under increased scrutiny from the Left. Bracketing the language of ‘race’ has meant that the discourse of skin groups remains at the level of abstraction and does not speak to real groups as such. As a descriptor, race essentializes identity as if skin color were a reliable way to perceive one's self and group as well as others, and questions the viability of a social struggle based on race. In other words, race is not real and discourses that insist on its objective status are ensnared in reification. The response—equally from the Left—has been to reassert the centrality and changing dynamics of race in education and society. They argue that we need to develop more, rather than less, complex discourses on race. Orientations that attempt to discredit race analysis are therefore unable to dismantle the racial system because they refuse its significance as an autonomous system of interpellations. In other words, race is real. This essay appraises the debate within the Left about the status of race, their projections about the future of race, and the kind of struggle they promote in order to realize a society freed from the chains of racism.

“Given the history of ideas about race and the present knowledge that race does not have the biological foundation that the lay public continues to think it does, philosophers addressing race at this time would seem to have a professional obligation to think through the implications for related topics of the biological non-existence of race. For instance, […].

"In this groundbreaking book Jean Walton subjects psychoanalysis to a sustained and highly illuminating ethnographic critique.

A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism ...

Psychoanalysis, race, and racism -- From psychoanalysis to political theory -- Reparative group leadership -- Conflict and authenticity -- Bonding and solidarity -- Coalitions and reparative politics.

Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often presumed to be a social construction and we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually. Desiring Whiteness explores this visual discrimination by asking questions in specifically psychoanalytic terms: how do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshadri-Crooks demonstrates that race is a system of differences organized around a privileged term: Whiteness. Contra "Whiteness Studies," she argues that Whiteness should not be understood as the bodily or material property of a particular group, but as a term that makes the logic of race thinkingpossible.

The Multicultural Imagination is a challenging inquiry into the complex interrelationship between our ideas about race, color and the unconscious. Drawing on clinical case material, Michael Vannoy Adams argues that race is just as important as sex or any other content of the unconscious. He does not assume that racism will simply vanish if we psychoanalyze a patient, but shows how a non-defensive ego and a self-image that is receptive to other-images can move us towards a more productive discourse of cultural differences. The Multicultural Imagination provokes the reader--analyst or not--to confront personally those unconscious attitudes which stand in the way of authentic multicultural relationships.

Sociological explanations of racism tend to concentrate on the structures and dynamics of modern life that facilitate discrimination and hierarchies of inequality. In doing so, they often fail to address why racial hatred arises (as opposed to how it arises) as well as to explain why it can be so visceral and explosive in character. Bringing together sociological perspectives with psychoanalytic concepts and tools, this text offers a clear, accessible and thought-provoking synthesis of varieties of theory, with the aim of clarifying the complex character of racism, discrimination and social exclusion in the contemporary world.