Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy

Reviews / Votes

"Valls provides a clear, useful introduction to the issues, after which he and twelve other contributors arraign major figures from Descartes through Nietzsche, usually drawing appropriate nuanced conclusions. Each chapter cites most or all of the significant race-related remarks of the thinker under review. Recommended."-Choice, April 2006 "The analyses and explorations at the heart of this book are long overdue: they emerge from and contribute substantively to ongoing discussions and critiques of canonical figures of modern ('Western') philosophy with regard to these figures' notions of race and the relevance of and impact on their philosophizing of these notions. Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy is a systematically and thematically focused book on the racial considerations of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche. Unprecedented."-Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., Vanderbilt University "Andrew Valls has assembled a first-rate group of experts to examine racism and race-thinking in the history of Western philosophy. This collection raises the current debate over the extent to which racism has distorted our philosophical legacy to a new level of scholarship and sophistication. It immediately becomes the essential and most important reading for anyone entering that dispute."-J. L. A. Garcia, Boston College, author of The Heart of Racism