- New
-
Topics
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- Journals
- Submit material
- More
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality > Philosophy of Race > Conceptions of Race > Race as a Biological Kind
Race as a Biological Kind
Edited by David Miguel Gray (University of Memphis)
About this topic
| Summary | Is race something we can fully explain in terms of the natural world around us? Races thought of as biological kinds invoke some type of racial 'naturalism'. While the term ‘Naturalism’ is used in many different ways, we can think of Naturalism as the view that properties within a particular domain of investigation are physical properties. For instance, there are lots of domains of inquiry where we may believe in non-physical properties. You might believe in numbers, which are a kind of abstract object as they aren’t located in time or space. Or you might think that moral properties like the wrongness of pushing someone in front of a car, is a non-physical property: that is, if we look at all the physical stuff involved in pushing someone in front of a car: e.g. the car, the person, the act of pushing, you might think that the wrongness is not among those physical parts. If one were to be a naturalist about moral properties, they might claim that the moral properties are among the physical parts. But leaving that difficult debate on moral naturalism aside, we can say that to be a naturalist about race is to say that racial properties just are physical properties. If you are wondering what, aside from physical properties, racial properties could be, one possible alternative is that racial properties are social properties. Social properties are those that are dependent on human acts and decisions while physical properties are thought to be independent of human acts and decisions. Take an example of an object like the Great Sphinx of Giza. The property of being made of limestone is a natural property of the statue. Limestone isn’t something that is the result of human actions or decision making. However, the fact that this object is a statue isn’t a natural property. Someone decided to shape the limestone into a couchant sphinx. So what’s the upshot of thinking of races as being composed of natural properties? Well, that means that races exist independently of any human actions or decision making processes. Races are something in the world that natural scientists can investigate and discover. The opposing view would be that races are created by people, and this treats races as social constructions. So now we have an idea both of what it means to think of races in terms of natural properties as well as what that view can be contrasted with. This leads us to the question which natural properties? For the naturalist there are lots of different accounts of what a race could be. Before the 20th century when race seemed to be studied primarily by natural historians the following features were associated with racial naturalism 1. Races have either natural essences or some set of observable natural properties that are shared by all or most members of that race. 2. These natural properties are inheritable 3. These natural properties place races into a hierarchical systems where they can be differentiated in terms of physical, behavioral, intellectual, and moral characteristics. I’m not going to spend any time on these older views as they aren’t currently held for any scientific reasons in the scientific communities. While these views were central to earlier scientific theories of race, nowadays, they only pop up infrequently among those who have a limited and/or motivated understanding of biological properties. This leads us to what some philosophers like, Josh Glasgow, have called “The New biology of race”. Unlike the old biology of race the new biology holds that races have natural properties that are common to most members of that race. These natural properties give us no reason to think that any intellectual, moral, or behavioral characteristics can be attributed to races in virtue of shared natural properties. While there are many possible accounts of which natural properties could be used to define race, one approach, that has gained a following, is to think of races as partially defined by, or caused by, reproductively isolated breeding populations. A population is a group of the same species that live in the same place. What makes a population a breeding population is that members of this group can and do sexually reproduce. However, there are a few things that could make a breeding population reproductively isolated. One way is that the breeding population is geographically cut off from other breeding populations of their own species. (For instance, you could imagine a group of people cut off from others because they live on an island, or are separated by mountains or desserts). In this case geographic properties of our world would shape our natural properties. Another way a breeding population could be reproductively isolated is that even though a population is located together and could interbreed, portions of that population don’t interbreed with other portions. For instance, if there were cultural taboos about subgroups of wealthy or short individuals breeding with subgroups of poor or tall individuals, those subgroups could be reproductively isolated even if they live in the same location. In this case, social elements of our world would shape our natural properties. So that’s what reproductively isolated breeding populations are. But how might they be used to define race? One way is that we can often define race in terms of ancestral relations. For instance, if someone is of a particular race, let’s call it race X, we can explain conditions for that individual being of that race: if one’s parents are both of race X, then one is also of race X. You might see a couple problems here. First, what happens when one parent is of race X but another parent is of race Y? In this case we might have to say that the offspring are either a new race (Z?) or don’t have a race as they are the product of non-isolated breeding populations. Second, even if one’s parents are both members of race X what makes them members of that race? The answer is that their parents were also of race X. But now we are off on an infinite regress: the explanation of what makes someone a member of a race is not answered but just pushed back a generation each time that question gets asked. We need an explanation that stops the infinite regress. One of two answers is normally given here. One option is to say that one’s ancestor is a member of race X in virtue of sharing similar phenotypic, or observable, properties specific to other members of one’ s reproductively isolated breeding population. A second option is to say that one’s ancestor is a member of race X in virtue of sharing similar genotypic, or genetic, properties specific to other members of one’s reproductively isolated breeding population. Given that much of our genetic makeup plays no direct role in our observable traits, the genotypic similarities would not necessarily mean that races have phenotypic similarities. So the accounts I just sketched which make use of ancestral relations among reproductively isolated breeding populations and either genotypic or phenotypic properties is one way to develop a naturalistic account of race. I should note that in an attempt to be quite inclusive of a variety of naturalist theories, I have not specified the different ways this account can be developed in order to respond to various concerns. (For detailed examples of this sort of approach see key works below). -David Miguel Gray |
| Key works | Here are three naturalist accounts of race. Philip Kitcher. “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture” in Racism, L. Harris (ed.), New York: Humanity Books. 87-117. Robin Andreasen 2005. “The Meaning of ‘Race’: Folk Conception and the New Biology of Race*” The Journal of Philosophy, 94-106. Quayshawn Spencer 2014. “A Radical Solution to the Race Problem” Philosophy of Science, 1025-1038. And for an attack on naturalist accounts see: Joshua Glasgow, 2005. “On the New Biology of Race, The Journal of Philosophy, 456-74. |
| Introductions | Ned Block’s “How Heritability misleads about Race” https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html Alan Templeton “Biological Races in Humans” |
Show all references
Related
Contents
101 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 101 |
- Self-interest and Henry Heine on the lack of English minor masters.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscriptI argue that Henry Heine's assessment of the English - that they are either universal geniuses or self-interested mediocrities - is prone to an objection that draws upon his own characterization. I tried to write this in an Edwardian style but the result is a mishmash.
- Folk concepts of race, cross-culturally.Leda Berio, Steffen Koch, Daniel James, Benedict Kenyah-Damptey & Alex Wiegmann - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.The investigation of folk concepts of race has been central to many theoretical and experimental contributions in recent decades; however, most of these contributions have been centred around the North American cultural context. Despite many philosophers pointing to a possible discrepancy between the European, and especially the German, context and the U.S.-American one, a systematic investigation has yet to be undertaken. This paper provides the first cross-cultural experimental study of U.S.-American and German concepts of race. More specifically, it examines whether (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - A Framework for the Metaphysics of Race.Daniel Z. Korman - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.Philosophers have appealed to a wide variety of different factors in providing a metaphysics of race: appearance, ancestry, systems of oppression, shared ways of life, and so-called “racial essences”. I distinguish four importantly different questions about racial groups that one may be answering in appealing these factors. I then show that marking these distinctions proves quite fruitful, revealing ways of strengthening existing arguments for the non-existence of racial groups, new avenues for addressing challenges to biological and constructionist accounts of race, (...)
- Kant and Forster on the Unity of Mankind.Jennifer Mensch - forthcoming - Annals of Science.In 1786 Georg Forster published a widely read critique of Immanuel Kant’s theory of race. Since then, the dispute between Forster and Kant on the unity of mankind has been widely discussed in light of both Forster’s essay and Kant’s decision to write a lengthy response to Forster in 1788. In this discussion I widen the frame for considering the two positions by focusing on Kant’s lectures on Physical Geography. In these notes Kant emerges as an ethnographer asking many of (...)
- Key Texts in the History and Philosophy of the German Life Sciences, 1745-1845: Generation, Heredity, and Race.Jennifer Mensch & Michael J. Olson (eds.) - forthcoming - London: Bloomsbury Academic.The aim of this collection is to create a curated set of key German source texts from the eighteenth-century life sciences devoted to theories of generation, heredity, and race. The criteria for inclusion stem from our sense that there is an argument to be made for connecting three domains of inquiry that have heretofore remained mostly distinct in both their presentation and scholarly analysis: i) life science debates regarding generation and embryogenesis, ii) emerging philosophical and anthropological theories regarding the nature (...)
- Species, Variety, Race: Vocabularies of Difference from Buffon to Kant.Jennifer Mensch - 2024 - Dianoia: Rivista di filosofia 39 (3):156-179.Eighteenth-century German writers with broad interests in natural history, and in particular, in the kind of ethnographic reports typically included in travel and expedition narratives, had to be able to access and read the original reports or they had to work with translations. The translators of these reports were, moreover, typically forced more than usual into the role of interpreter. This was especially the case when it came to accounts wherein vocabulary did not exist or was at least not settled, (...)
- “Cultural Racism”: Biology and Culture in Racist Thought.Lawrence Blum - 2023 - Journal of Social Philosophy 54 (3):350-369.Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly but (...)
- (1 other version)James Africanus Beale Horton: Racism and the Fate of Naturalism in Victorian Philosophical Anthropology. [REVIEW]Zeyad El Nabolsy - 2023 - Black Issues in Philosophy/ Blog of the Apa.There has been a recent increase in interest in the place of race in the writings of modern canonical European philosophers (e.g., in Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel). However, while it is undoubtedly necessary to undertake such investigations, we should also not stop there, insofar as stopping there does not, in fact, overturn the charge of Eurocentrism or parochialism which has often been leveled against academic philosophy. Because the circle of interlocutors is not being expanded in such an approach, it (...)
- Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust.Jonathan Anomaly - 2022 - In Ira Bedzow & Stacy Gallin (eds.), Bioethics and the Holocaust. Springer. pp. 153-170.
- Why Social Constructionists Should Embrace Minimalist Race.Michael Hardimon - 2022 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (S1):37-53.My thesis is that social constructionists should embrace minimalist race. By this I mean they should accept the minimalist concept of race and the existence of minimalist races. They are likely to reject this suggestion because they are antirealists about biological race. But their antirealism about biological race is based on their identification of the biological concept of race with the racialist concept of race. The minimalist concept of race is free of the invidious features that make the racialist concept (...)
- What Is Race? Four Philosophers, Six Views.Phila Mfundo Msimang - 2022 - Philosophical Papers 51 (1):115-145.In this commentary I give an overview of the book "What is Race?: Four Philosophical Views," outlining the arguments each author makes in formulating and defending their respective views. I present some challenges to these views and argue that the scope of the book is an important consideration in our assessment of its contribution.
- Lewontin (1972).Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2021 - In Ludovica Lorusso & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther (eds.), Remapping Race in a Global Context. Routledge. pp. 9-47.
- Is “Race” Modern? Disambiguating the Question.Adam Hochman - 2020 - Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1:1-19.Race theorists have been unable to reach a consensus regarding the basic historical question, “is ‘race’ modern?” I argue that this is partly because the question itself is ambiguous. There is not really one question that race scholars are answering, but at least six. First, is the concept of race modern? Second, is there a modern concept of race that is distinct from earlier race concepts? Third, are “races” themselves modern? Fourth, are racialized groups modern? Fifth, are the means and (...)
- Janus‐faced race: Is race biological, social, or mythical?Adam Hochman - 2020 - American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1.As belief in the reality of race as a biological category among U.S. anthropologists has fallen, belief in the reality of race as a social category has risen in its place. The view that race simply does not exist—that it is a myth—is treated with suspicion. While racial classification is linked to many of the worst evils of recent history, it is now widely believed to be necessary to fight back against racism. In this article, I argue that race is (...)
- More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish Cofnas.Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, Helen De Cruz, Jonathan Kaplan, Agustín Fuentes, Jonathan Marks, Massimo Pigliucci, Mark Alfano, David Livingstone Smith & Lauren Schroeder - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (7):893-898.This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review process and resulted in substantial revisions.
- Understanding Race: The Case for Political Constructionism in Public Discourse.David Ludwig - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4):492-504.The aim of this article is to develop an understanding-based argument for an explicitly political specification of the concept of race. It is argued that a specification of race in terms of hierarchical social positions is best equipped to guide causal reasoning about racial inequality in the public sphere. Furthermore, the article provides evidence that biological and cultural specifications of race mislead public reasoning by encouraging confusions between correlates and causes of racial inequality. The article concludes with a more general (...)
- Amelioration vs. Perversion.Teresa Marques - 2020 - In Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...)$73.01 used (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citation Bookmark 16 citations
- What is Race? Four Philosophical Views.Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers & Quayshawn Spencer - 2019 - Oup Usa.In this debate-format book, four philosophers--Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer--articulate contrasting views on race. Each author presents a distinct viewpoint on what race is, and then replies to the others, offering theories that are clear and accessible to undergraduates, lay readers, and non-specialists, as well as other philosophers of race.
- Racialization: A Defense of the Concept.Adam Hochman - 2019 - Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (8):1245-1262.This paper defends the concept of racialization against its critics. As the concept has become increasingly popular, questions about its meaning and value have been raised, and a backlash against its use has occurred. I argue that when “racialization” is properly understood, criticisms of the concept are unsuccessful. I defend a definition of racialization and identify its companion concept, “racialized group.” Racialization is often used as a synonym for “racial formation.” I argue that this is a mistake. Racial formation theory (...)
- Race and Reference.Adam Hochman - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (2):32.The biological race debate is at an impasse. Issues surrounding hereditarianism aside, there is little empirical disagreement left between race naturalists and anti-realists about biological race. The disagreement is now primarily semantic. This would seem to uniquely qualify philosophers to contribute to the biological race debate. However, philosophers of race are reluctant to focus on semantics, largely because of their worries about the ‘flight to reference’. In this paper, I show how philosophers can contribute to the debate without taking the (...)
- Globalizing the savage: From stadial theory to a theory of luxury in late-18th-century Swedish discussions of Africa.Hanna Hodacs & Mathias Persson - 2019 - History of the Human Sciences 32 (4):100-114.This article examines the effects of globalization on changing notions of the ‘savage’. We compare discussions taking place in different contexts in the late 18th century concerning two Swedish scholars and travellers to Africa: Anders Sparrman (1748–1820), a naturalist and Linnaean disciple, and Carl Bernhard Wadström (1746–99), an engineer and economist. Both moved in Swedish Swedenborgian circles, and both became involved in the British abolitionist movement. Nevertheless, their images of African ‘Others’ diverged in crucial respects, reflecting differences in their ideological (...)
- I—A More Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2019 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1):25-48.One debate that metaphysicians of race have been consumed with since the 1990s is what we can call the US race debate, which is the debate about what the nature and reality of race is according to the dominant ways that ‘race’ and race terms are used to classify people in contemporary American English. In 2014, I contributed a defence of biological racial realism in the US race debate that utilized new results about human genetic clustering from population genetics. In (...)
- Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism, by Michael O. Hardimon.Joshua Glasgow - 2018 - Mind 127 (507):911-919.© Mind Association 2018This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...It starts when someone, often a highly visible someone, challenges a widely used and commonly accepted idea. In stage two, defenders of conventional wisdom recruit complicated and unexpected theories to save common sense. Statistics may be involved. Jargon is likely. In the third stage, the common-sense-preserving theories are themselves critiqued. At this point, some may rekindle the proposal to eliminate the (...)
- (1 other version)Racial realism I: Are biological races real?Quayshawn Spencer - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (1):e12467.In this article, I discuss and critique how metaphysicians of race have conceived of and defended racial realism according to how biologists use “race”. I start by defining “racial realism” in the broadest accepted way in the metaphysics of race. Next, I summarize a representative sample of recent attempts from metaphysicians of race and biologists to defend racial realism and the main criticisms against each attempt. I discuss how metaphysicians of race have defended racial realism according to how ordinary people (...)
- Race Research and the Ethics of Belief.Jonny Anomaly - 2017 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 14 (2):287-297.On most accounts, beliefs are supposed to fit the world rather than change it. But believing can have social consequences, since the beliefs we form underwrite our actions and impact our character. Because our beliefs affect how we live our lives and how we treat other people, it is surprising how little attention is usually given to the moral status of believing apart from its epistemic justification. In what follows, I develop a version of the harm principle that applies to (...)
- Minimalist Biological Race.Michael Hardimon - 2017 - In Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. New York, USA: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 150-9.The minimalist concept of race represents the barest characterization of the ordinary concept race possible. Minimalist races are groups of human beings distinguished by patterns of visible physical features, groups whose members are linked by a common ancestry peculiar to members of the group, and which originate from a distinctive geographic location. Minimalist races exist because there are existing human groups that satisfy the minimalist concept of race. Their existence is not precluded by the findings of population genetics. Appeal to (...)(collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark 1 citation
- Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism.Michael O. Hardimon - 2017 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Many scholars and activists seek to eliminate “race”—the word and the concept—from our vocabulary. Their claim is clear: because science has shown that racial essentialism is false and because the idea of race has proved virulent, we should do away with the concept entirely. Michael O. Hardimon criticizes this line of thinking, arguing that we must recognize the real ways in which race exists in order to revise our understanding of its significance. Rethinking Race provides a novel answer to the (...)
- In defense of the metaphysics of race.Adam Hochman - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (11):2709–2729.In this paper I defend the metaphysics of race as a valuable philosophical project against deflationism about race. The deflationists argue that metaphysical debate about the reality of race amounts to a non-substantive verbal dispute that diverts attention from ethical and practical issues to do with ‘race.’ In response, I show that the deflationists mischaracterize the field and fail to capture what most metaphysicians of race actually do in their work, which is almost always pluralist and very often normative and (...)
- Replacing Race: Interactive Constructionism about Racialized Groups.Adam Hochman - 2017 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4:61-92.In this paper I defend anti-realism about race and a new theory of racialization. I argue that there are no races, only racialized groups. Many social constructionists about race have adopted racial formation theory to explain how ‘races’ are formed. However, anti-realists about race cannot adopt racial formation theory, because it assumes the reality of race. I introduce interactive constructionism about racialized groups as a theory of racialization for anti-realists about race. Interactive constructionism moves the discussion away from the dichotomous (...)
- The Practical Implications of the New Metaphysics of Race for a Postracial Medicine: Biomedical Research Methodology, Institutional Requirements, Patient–Physician Relations.Joanna K. Malinowska & Tomasz Żuradzki - 2017 - American Journal of Bioethics 17 (9):61-63.Perez-Rodriguez and de la Fuente (2017) assume that although human races do not exist in a biological sense (“geneticists and evolutionary biologists generally agree that the division of humans into races/subspecies has no defensible scientific basis,” they exist only as “sociocultural constructions” and because of that maintain an illusory reality, for example, through “racialized” practices in medicine. Agreeing with the main postulates formulated in the article, we believe that the authors treat this problem in a superficial manner and have failed (...)
- The Explication Defence of Arguments from Reference.Mark Pinder - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (6):1253-1276.In a number of influential papers, Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich have presented a powerful critique of so-called arguments from reference, arguments that assume that a particular theory of reference is correct in order to establish a substantive conclusion. The critique is that, due to cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions supposedly undermining the standard methodology for theorising about reference, the assumption that a theory of reference is correct is unjustified. I argue that the many extant responses to Machery et al.’s (...)
- (1 other version)Racial realism II: Are folk races real?Quayshawn Spencer - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 13 (1):e12467.This article is Part II in a pair of articles on racial realism. In Part I, I defined “racial realism” and discussed the major attempts in the past twenty years among metaphysicians of race and biologists to defend racial realism from the viewpoint of what biologists mean by “race.” In this article, I continue discussing and critiquing how metaphysicians of race have conceived of and defended racial realism, but with a focus on how ordinary people use “race.” I focus on (...)
- Are Clusters Races? A Discussion of the Rhetorical Appropriation of Rosenberg et al.’s “Genetic Structure of Human Populations”.Melissa Wills - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (12).Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, (...)
- Race: Deflate or pop?Adam Hochman - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:60-68.
- Beyond the realism debate: The metaphysics of ‘racial’ distinctions.Olivier Lemeire - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 59:47-56.The current metaphysical race debate is very much focused on the realism question whether races exist. In this paper I argue against the importance of this question. Philosophers, biologists and anthropologists expect that answering this question will tell them something substantive about the metaphysics of racial classifications, and will help them to decide whether it is justified to use racial categories in scientific research and public policy. I argue that there are two reasons why these expectations are not fulfilled. First (...)
- Of Vikings and Nazis: Norwegian contributions to the rise and the fall of the idea of a superior Aryan race.Adam Hochman - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 54:84-88.Nazi ideology was premised on a belief in the superiority of the Germanic race. However, the idea of a superior Germanic race was not invented by the Nazis. By the beginning of the 20th century this idea had already gained not only popular but also mainstream scientific support in England, Germany, the U.S., Scandinavia, and other parts of the world in which people claimed Germanic origins (p. xiii). Yet how could this idea, which is now recognised as ideology of the (...)
- Against the New Metaphysics of Race.David Ludwig - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):244-265.The aim of this article is to develop an argument against metaphysical debates about the existence of human races. I argue that the ontology of race is underdetermined by both empirical and non-empirical evidence due to a plurality of equally permissible candidate meanings of "race." Furthermore, I argue that this underdetermination leads to a deflationist diagnosis according to #hich disputes about the existence of human races are non-substantive verbal disputes. $hile this diagnosis resembles general deflationist strategies in contemporary metaphysics" I (...)
- Thinking about populations and races in time.Roberta L. Millstein - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52:5-11.Biologists and philosophers have offered differing concepts of biological race. That is, they have offered different candidates for what a biological correlate of race might be; for example, races might be subspecies, clades, lineages, ecotypes, or genetic clusters. One thing that is striking about each of these proposals is that they all depend on a concept of population. Indeed, some authors have explicitly characterized races in terms of populations. However, including the concept of population into concepts of race raises three (...)
- Are human races cladistic subspecies?Zinhle Mncube - 2015 - South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):163-174.In the article titled ‘A new perspective on the race debate’，Robin O. Andreasen argues that contrary to popular scientific belief, human races are biologically real—it is just that we are wrong about them. Andreasen calls her contemporary biological concept of race ‘the cladistic race concept’ (or CRC). Her theory uses theory from cladistics—a systematic school founded by entomologist Willi Hennig in 1950—to define human races genealogically as cladistic subspecies. In this paper I will argue that despite its promise as a (...)
- Introduction: Genomics and Philosophy of Race.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Roberta L. Millstein & Rasmus Nielsen - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52:1-4.This year’s topic is “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” Different researchers might work on distinct subsets of the six thematic clusters below, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive: (1) Concepts of ‘Race’; (2) Mathematical Modeling of Human History and Population Structure; (3) Data and Technologies of Human Genomics; (4) Biological Reality of Race; (5) Racialized Selves in a Global Context; (6) Pragmatic Consequences of ‘Race Talk’ among Biologists.
- Race, Genes, and the Ethics of Belief: A review of Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance. [REVIEW]Jonny Anomaly - 2014 - Hastings Center Report 44 (5):51-52.A Troublesome Inheritance, by Nicholas Wade, should be read by anyone interested in race and recent human evolution. Wade deserves credit for challenging the popular dogma that biological differences between groups either don't exist or cannot explain the relative success of different groups at different tasks. Wade's work should be read alongside another recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Together, these books represent a major turning point in the public (...)
- Unnaturalised Racial Naturalism.Adam Hochman - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46 (1):79-87.Quayshawn Spencer (2014) misunderstands my treatment of racial naturalism. I argued that racial naturalism must entail a strong claim, such as “races are subspecies”, if it is to be a substantive position that contrasts with anti-realism about biological race. My recognition that not all race naturalists make such a strong claim is evident throughout the article Spencer reviews (Hochman, 2013a). Spencer seems to agree with me that there are no human subspecies, and he endorses a weaker form of racial naturalism. (...)
- Realism, Antirealism, and Conventionalism about Race.Jonathan Michael Kaplan & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1039-1052.This paper distinguishes three concepts of "race": bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A.W.F. Edwards' 2003 response to Lewontin (1972), and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially crucial to the first episode, while normativity is central to the second. Upon inspection, each episode also reveals a variety of commitments to the metaphysics of race. We conclude by interrogating (...)
- (1 other version)Hysteria, race, and phlogiston. A model of ontological elimination in the human sciences.David Ludwig - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (1):68-77.Elimination controversies are ubiquitous in philosophy and the human sciences. For example, it has been suggested that human races, hysteria, intelligence, mental disorder, propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, the self, and the super-ego should be eliminated from the list of respectable entities in the human sciences. I argue that eliminativist proposals are often presented in the framework of an oversimplified “phlogiston model” and suggest an alternative account that describes ontological elimination on a gradual scale between criticism of empirical (...)
- If Not Races, then What? Toward a Revised Understanding of Bio-Social Groupings.Lucius T. Outlaw - 2014 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35 (1-2):275-296.
- A Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1025-1038.It has become customary among philosophers and biologists to claim that folk racial classification has no biological basis. This paper attempts to debunk that view. In this paper, I show that ‘race’, as used in current U.S. race talk, picks out a biologically real entity. I do this by, first, showing that ‘race’, in this use, is not a kind term, but a proper name for a set of human population groups. Next, using recent human genetic clustering results, I show (...)
- Racial Norms: A Reinterpretation of Du Bois' “The Conservation of Races”.David Miguel Gray - 2013 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (4):465-487.I argue that standard explanations of Du Bois' theory of race inappropriately characterize his view as attempting to provide descriptive criteria for races. Such an interpretation makes it both susceptible to Appiah's circularity objection and alienates it from Du Bois' central project of solidarity—which is the central point of “Conservation.” I propose that we should understand his theory as providing a normative account of race: an attempt to characterize what some races should be in terms of what other races are. (...)
- Racial discrimination: How not to do it.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (3):278-286.The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...)
- Against the New Racial Naturalism.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy 110 (6):331–51.Support for the biological concept of race declined slowly but steadily during the second half of the twentieth century. However, debate about the validity of the race concept has recently been reignited. Genetic-clustering studies have shown that despite the small proportion of genetic variation separating continental populations, it is possible to assign some individuals to their continents of origin, based on genetic data alone. Race naturalists have interpreted these studies as empirically confirming the existence of human subspecies, and by extension (...)
- Was Race thinking invented in the modern West?Ron Mallon - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (1):77-88.The idea that genuinely racial thinking is a modern invention is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. However, it is not always clear exactly what the content of such a conceptual break is supposed to be. One suggestion is that with the scientific revolution emerged a conception of human groups that possessed essences that were thought to explain group-typical features of individuals as well the accumulated products of cultures or civilizations. However, recent work by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists suggests (...)
| 1 — 50 / 101 |
PhilPapers logo by Andrea Andrews and Meghan Driscoll.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation
Server: philpapers-web-559df78dcc-vpvvv uwo