Ebook: Race and the Enlightenment - A Reader

" ... this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid" (Immanuel Kant)

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze collects into one convenient and controversial volume the most important and influential writings on race that the European Enlightenment produced.

In Enlightenment thought reason and civilization became associated with "white" people and northern Europe, while unreason and savagery were conveniently located among "blacks" and non-whites outside Europe, in, for example, the "Dark Continent" of Africa.

The writers and thinkers represented here are: Linné, Buffon, Hume, Beattie, Kant, Herder, Blumenbach, Jefferson, Cuvier, and Hegel. In addition there are entries on the Negro from Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All texts are situated within their historical, social, and intellectual contexts. A comprehensive introduction, presuming no prior familiarity with the texts concerned, serves as a guide to the student and general reader.

The editor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University. His teaching and research interests are in modern European philosophy, African philosophy, and critical social theory. He is a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University during 1996/7, and in spring 1997, Diamond Distinguished Visitor in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. Author of significant essays on Hume and Kant, he is editor of Postcolonial African Philosophy and African Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell Publishers, both forthcoming), and is working on a book on post-Enlightenment and postcolonial philosophy for Stanford University Press.