Overview

In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. Blending metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Winant, and Naomi Zack. The result is the first philosophical introduction to the field of race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race. The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don't we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories, and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. Race is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Full Product Details

9780745628820

Table of Contents

Reviews

Combining conceptual analysis, historical perspective, and down-to-earth yet dazzling intelligence, Race: A Philosophical Introduction is an indispensable guide to understanding and ultimately cutting through the tangle of confusion that surrounds the concept of race. In place of that confusion, Paul Taylor offers an elegant, rigorous, yet supremely common-sense view of the (non-biologistic) reality of race. This is philosophy as Socrates and John Dewey imagined it could and should be: an exacting, clear-eyed, non-doctrinaire sorting-out of one of the most pressing problems of our culture. Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities, University of Kentucky

Combining conceptual analysis, historical perspective, and down--to--earth yet dazzling intelligence, Race: A Philosophical Introduction is an indispensable guide to understanding and ultimately cutting through the tangle of confusion that surrounds the concept of race. In place of that confusion, Paul Taylor offers an elegant, rigorous, yet supremely common--sense view of the (non--biologistic) reality of race. This is philosophy as Socrates and John Dewey imagined it could and should be: an exacting, clear--eyed, non--doctrinaire sorting--out of one of the most pressing problems of our culture. Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities, University of Kentucky

Author Information

Paul Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available