Abstract

John Harfouch’s new book, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, argues that Immanuel Kant, widely considered the most influential philosopher of the modern period, is the first to claim the lives of non-white people are redundant and worthless. He articulates this through a metaphysics of minds and bodies that ultimately transforms the meaning of philosophy’s mind-body problem. A mind-body problem in the Kantian tradition is not a problem of how minds and bodies interact or brain states give rise to consciousness. Rather, the problem is one of how a union of minds and bodies regenerates without reason, or of how a oneness repeats its own nothingness. Born without reason, the non-white world is a kind of human waste that can be eliminated without consequence. Accordingly, a properly understood history of the mind-body problem reckons with the problem of genocidal violence. Following this transformation of the mind-body problem from the late sixteenth century through Descartes’s writings and into the eighteenth century, Harfouch argues in Another Mind-Body Problem that philosophy has not understood its most canonical and long-standing problem and must now change who is hired and funded to solve it.