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Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze was a Nigerian philosopher. Eze was a specialist in postcolonial philosophy. He wrote as well as edited influential postcolonial histories of philosophy in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
This collection, which contains the central primary texts for that project, demonstrates the value of delving into the heart of to use Eze's working title for the book the racist Enlightenment. The seventeen brief readings in this anthology—occupying pages total—provide canonical authors' texts on race. These texts provide extremely useful context for studying and evaluating contemporary claims that Enlightenment thinkers used racist and sexist conceptions of rationality, autonomy, and progress.
The book focuses on texts from the last decades of the seventeenth century; only four by Linneaus, Buffon, and Hume were published before and just one Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History after Eze is mainly concerned with the triumvirate of Hume, Hegel, and especially Kant; the other readings provide background to, and display the influences on and of, those philosophers.
For example, the texts document Kant's use of Linneaus's, Buffon's, and Hume's ideas. As Eze's admirably concise introduction to Linneaus points out, many eighteenth-century thinkers subsequently assumed that the classification of humans into races follows a divine hierarchy. In a footnote to the original introduction to the Critique of Judgment , Kant retains that assumption but criticizes Linnaeus's theistic justification of the hierarchy: what is needed, Kant argues, is a transcendental grounding of the order of nature.
Eze's selections from this text and from the "Physical Geography" section of the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View published posthumously in display Kant's use of Buffon's account of the geographical differentiation of human races, from which Eze includes significant selections in the anthology.
Eze also includes a text by Hume that Kant used to justify his dismissal of Africans' mental capacities. In a footnote to his essay "Of National Characters" , Hume asserted "I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all other species of men Perhaps, encoded in such misapprehensions are later forms of denials about their fitness for civilization. Beyond the ways in which these categories emerged, it is important to understand that normative man based on assumptions of Western cultural experiences.
The result of that philosophizing produced norms for human culture and behavior that inspired how institutions and structures that guided society were to be constructed. These were disciplines, as Michel Foucault, has shown that were in service to power.
It is important to clarify, also, that Enlightenment philosophers were products of their environment. However, their ideas helped to reify race and racial categories at a critical time in the modern age.
Emmanuel C. Race science emerged at a moment in time where colonialism, dispossession, and enslavement were emerging to prop up the empires of Western Europe. These philosophical musings and empirical studies—if they can be called that—were utilized in order to offer rationales for European conquest. Race science has been largely discredited. The Enlightenment, however, continues to resonate among partisans of Western thought. It remains the lodestar for how to reason, how to arrive at knowledge.
Intellectual historians like Jonathan Israel have recently argued that Enlightenment was radical and responsible for advances in human relationships and societal changes. For instance, what has become known as positive liberalism, following the famous split envisaged by Isaiah Berlin, is considered part of the same Enlightenment project as negative liberalism.
Israel has advanced an argument that claims an Enlightenment that makes possible everything from the abolition of enslavement to modern notions of human rights. These newer works have not been able to see how race and racial thinking were co-articulated with Enlightenment conceptions of human nature.
And thus, they have not been able to see racism as one of its products, as one of its continued legacies. Alternative intellectual histories have offered important responses. The genealogy of anti-racist thinking ranges broadly and deeply. Some of the earliest examples come from within Western thought. Not all philosophers believed that Western man constituted the normative human. However, their ideas were muted in service to larger, demonstrably political ambitions.
If we take the anti-racist foundations of different thinking traditions to heart, it allows us to look at the emergence of Enlightenment thought in a different register.
African American intellectual history is replete with examples of anti-racist thinking. From David Walker to W. Du Bois, there has been a long history of engaging the racial legacies of the West. Not all of these thinkers, however, have engaged the racial foundations of Enlightenment.
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