“Race and Enlightenment”
In observance of Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday, the German department organized a two-part mini-series of talks on “Race and Enlightenment,” with Professors Huaping Lu-Adler (Department of Philosophy) and Carl Niekerk (University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign) over the two semesters. The first event took place on November 15.
On November 15, Professor Huaping Lu-Adler (Department of Philosophy) addressed the question of racism in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, calling for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship.
In her book Kant, Race, and Racism. Views from Somewhere, 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. The book shows how, as a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature, and, as an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. Professor Lu-Adler claims that, In both roles, Kant left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements.