Another mind-body problem : the history of racial non-being / John Harfouch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harfouch, John, author.

Series:

SUNY series, philosophy and race

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophical anthropology.

Mind and body.

Human beings.

Race.

Physical anthropology.

Physical Description:

xxxv, 232 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018]

Summary:

Demonstrates the profound overlap of philosophy's mind-body problem and various racist doctrines found in thinkers ranging from Descartes to Kant. The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems. John Harfouch is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and the coeditor (with Leonard Lawlor) of The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon .

Contents:

Descartes' fundamental mind-body problem: the question of sex

A racial non-being

The thesis and goal of this study

The methodology of a critical history of the mind-body problem

A thing not-yet human: Bonnet's problem of the egg

The distinct origins of mind and body

The disposition of the blood and the sexual generation of the union

The racial legacy of a genealogical mind-body dualism

All races will be extinguished only not that of the whites: a mind-body problem in the Kantian tradition

Racial mind-body unions

The overturning of the mind-body problem

Solutions and experts.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438469959

1438469950

OCLC:

1009151525