Book Symposium: Kant, Race, and Racism, by Huaping Lu-Adler (Oxford, 2023)

15th-17th June 2023
University of Bochum, Germany (hybrid format)

In Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere, Huaping Lu-Adler (Georgetown) offers a thorough study of Kant’s views on race. She challenges some of the basic assumptions in how scholars have dealt with this topic, particularly the claim that racism contradicts Kant’s moral universalism. She shows how Kant’s raciology—divided into racialism and racism—is an integral part of his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach that treats Kant’s racism as a matter of personal prejudice. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. This means, as Lu-Adler contends in the forwardlooking conclusion to her book, that scholars who research and teach Kant’s philosophy have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship.

At this symposium, various scholars who have themselves worked on Kant’s raciology offered their takes on different aspects of the book. They included Jasmine Gani (St Andrews), Pauline Kleingeld (Groningen), Marina Martinez Mateo (Munich), Reza Mosayebi (Bochum), and Ewa Wyrębska-Đermanović (Bochum).

The workshop was organized by Reza Mosayebi (Bochum) and Marie Göbel (Bochum).

Contact: marie.goebel@rub.de

You can download the program here.