 now. Yeah, I'm very honored that you're all here today. I'm very happy that you're all here to join us for the very first lecture in our series on rereading the canon. Today we're going to learn about some fairly uncomfortable things. So some things might be aggravating to one person, but not to another, and something else might be aggravating to this person, but not the first one. So I think we need to be compassionate with each other. We need to be patient with we will definitely be challenged with regards to some of our dear philosophical heroes, and we probably have to think again about how we perceive some of our philosophical canonical figures, and that might be more or less comfortable, depending from where you come. Let me before I start with some brief introductions, an important remark that has to do with the place with the location that I'm speaking to you today from. I'm not in London at the moment, I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I live, and this is the homeland of the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Shawnee, and the Yuki tribal nations. And I just want to, before we start, acknowledge the genocidal violence and the force removal, removal these people had to suffer through. We need to remember that this violence is not a matter of the past. This kind of superior violence, this kind of colonialist violence is still alive, and it continues to take lives. So I think we shall acknowledge and honor and respect our fellow human beings from the Cherokee, from the Chickasaw, the Shawnee, and the Yuki tribal nations. And we shall acknowledge another fact that in which colonialism continues to take life continues to take life in this place where I live. Because just about 150 years ago in Knoxville, Tennessee and the United States, about every fifth human being living here was a slave. And the consequences of these abuse of human beings is still visible today. So this serious shell, however small its impact might be, be our contribution against the continuation of this kind of violence that we all know still exists in other forms and other shapes, but it is still there. And perhaps this can be our objection to the course of things of events as they have been up to this point. So as you know, in this lecture series, we are going to reread the canon. And I want to give some introductory remarks why this might be a necessary endeavor. And I will do so from a feminist point of view, before we go into the depth of the lecture of Warping's analysis of Kant and his problem with racism. Mary Ellen Waithe noted in 1989 that the accounts of the two millennia of history of our disciplines of philosophy are astonishingly incomplete and incorrect. And the reason for this astonishing incompleteness and incorrectness is disturbing as it is obvious. Those accounts typically omit any mention of contributions made to philosophers by women. Female philosophers were overlooked, not randomly, as with regards to their philosophical contributions, but because they were women. We can find an extraordinary bias against women in the history of philosophy, and this bias has affected philosophy, especially in the way philosophies remember. We cannot and we ought not, as Mary Ellen Waithe pointed out in another contribution, place any confidence in our encyclopedias, histories, epitomes and anthologies that are product of this distortion. The received canon, as Sarah Hutton remarked, is founded on conceptions of philosophy, and philosophical significance that are too restrictive to accommodate women. However, the disregard for women philosophers goes even further. Female philosophers have not only been ignored, the historical canon of Western philosophy is filled with overtly male supremacist views. Many of the thinkers considered to be canonical until today have made fiercely anti-female statements, and these are just not occasional anti-female statements. This is not just in passing a rejection of this or that female human being. This cannot be dismissed as minor aberrations of the philosophical imagination. There's more than just an uneasiness or a misunderstanding or an irritation. The vehemence with which generations of scholars have tried to establish the inferiority of women suggests that there's more at stake than usually acknowledged. Western philosophy is filled with an almost obsessive contempt toward female human beings, and I would like to suggest to call this contempt or this self-superhumanization superiorism. And it is very important that we understand that superiorism simply exists because it is possible, and because certain human beings made this possible reality through their will and through their actions of factual reality. And because certain human beings continue to do so, it continues to be a reality. So the important thing is that the factual reality of superiorism, be it a misogynist superiorism that I just addressed, or be it a racist superiorism about what Ping will speak about, it is a phenomenon that is not necessarily connected with philosophy, not necessarily connected with the nature of the human being. Certain human beings were violently excluded from the human endeavor of philosophy because of nothing other than the will and the action of certain other human beings. Because of nothing other than certain philosophers willing them out of the human endeavor of philosophy. And that undertaking this kind of action, this superiorism is necessarily violent. But there's still a lot to be found out. For example, what is the consequence of this violence? What is the damage this violence has done and does to female philosophers and to male philosophers? Of course, there's a great body of research on these questions, especially with regard to the damaging effect this way to philosophize has had and continues to have on the excluded philosophers. But it seems not yet to be understood what happens to philosophy itself when it is historically and ideologically rooted in violence. And can we philosophize non-violently at all when we're situated within the Western canon? And furthermore, we need to understand what motivated this violence, what made us believe that we're the superhuman. And please know that I am speaking as the white heterosexual male European philosopher from the top tier of the pyramid of undeserved privilege. And it seems to be, but it seems to be very important to understand what made us, and I'm speaking about myself and those who think that they are like me, what made us commit the superhuman fallacy? How could we or more precisely, how could some of us think that they were better than others? How did we dare to dignify this fantasma as philosophy when it is just when it is actually just a sad form of a rather fragile narcissism? Well, we are blessed here today because we have some good help for these questions on the way because we have the wonderful Huoping Lu Adler today with us. And Huoping is an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and vice president of the North American Khan Society, which is a very important thing I think to note in her biography given what she will talk about today. And she specializes in Kant in the 17th and 18th century Western philosophy more general. Her main interest now is to reconsider Kant's views on race in the historical and philosophical context. She has published three journal articles in this area over the last year or so. And very interestingly, her book is currently under review at Oxford University Press, and it's going to be entitled The View from Somewhere Kant, Race, and Racism. So we have a very exciting, very competent speaker today with us. And I'm very, very proud and very happy that Huoping is going to give the inaugural lecture in this lecture series. And we all will welcome you now, Huoping, and the floor is yours. And we are very excited to hear what you have to tell us. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you, Bjorn, for organizing this, and thank you all for coming. I'm going to share the screen with you all. You can all see the screen, right? So, Bjorn, if you can keep an eye on the wait room just in case anybody comes in late. Okay. And we're recording, right? Okay, great. Okay, all right. Thank you again. Okay, since mine is the first to talk in the series, I think I'm going to begin with an account of how I approach the canon problem in history of philosophy, history of modern philosophy. I'll then use Kant as a case study, which is based on my new book that Bjorn mentioned. In a way, much of what I'll say is like preaching to the choir, since a lot of you are already more or less involved in reforming the canon. With that in mind, I'll treat this talk as a humble opening for collective reflections on specific strategies for moving forward. And then to break down my longest talk, I'll pause a couple of times during the talk to see whether you have any questions. I think it would be nice to have discussions in between the segments of the talk. Okay, so now let me begin with a very simple observation that you should be very familiar with already. Here's the status quo at Georgetown University. And I think I believe at most other universities that have philosophy majors, the majors must fulfill their history requirements by taking two courses. One is a combined course on ancient and medieval philosophy. The other is on modern philosophy, which typically focuses on the 17th and 18th centuries. Both courses tend to be exclusively about the history of Western philosophy, although the titles suggested that they are about the history of philosophy, some particular. In the meantime, if a program offers courses on other philosophical traditions at all, the students may take them for personal edification, but cannot thereby fulfill their history requirements. This arrangement gives the impression that all these other philosophical traditions are not philosophical enough to be taken as seriously. In fact, professional philosophers in the West have long acted under the assumption that true philosophy started with ancient Greeks and continued to grow only in the West. This assumption is explicit in an anthology on ancient and medieval philosophy published by Oxford University Press in 1997. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but the editor makes the familiar assertion that the first philosophers were ancient Greeks and that no other ancient civilizations developed to true philosophy. In making these assertions, the editor begs the crucial question of what concepts of philosophy and simply repeats the trope that if ancient and Indian and Chinese, for instance, pondered on cosmic and ethical problems, they did so only on the basis of religion or intuition. It doesn't help that the American Philosophical Association's guide for undergraduates gives an ostensibly Eurocentric description of history of philosophy as a major subfield of philosophy. The description builds on the rigid division of the history of philosophy into five periods, although this division reflects a characteristically European periodization that cannot be mapped onto any other cultural history without distorting it. Meanwhile, all the examples mentioned in the description are Western ones, including the explicit reference to the foundations of Western civilization at the end. Now, this institutionally sanctioned Eurocentric framework is also the framework within which we have been trying to tackle the canon problem in modern philosophy. Superficially, the problem in this case is that the old canon revolves around seven men within the simplistic discursive framework, three rationalists, the empiricists, and Kant, the critical synthesizer. Unsurprisingly, the first radical departure from this canon was a feminist one, which sought to expand the canon by adding more and more women to it. More recently, in response to the criticism that the expanded canon is all white, there have been attempts to add philosophers of color. The go-to addition in this regard is Anton Vierham-Emmel, presumably because his work fits well with the existing canon by addressing familiar topics such as the mind-body problem. This expansion approach is fundamentally limited, however, especially if it's a starting point is the old canon. The most obvious problem is that if you simply add new figures to the existing canon and try to fit them into the same old discursive framework, you risk making the new additions near footnotes to the seven white men I mentioned. This problem is quite salient in the third edition of the popular anthology on modern philosophy edited by Roger Arieau and Eric Watkins published in 2019. It keeps the old canon's canonic structure exactly intact and adds philosophers like Emel and Dusha Tlae in a way that makes it seem as though their work is worth considering only third associations with Leibniz and Kant. Two other recent anthologies avoid this problem by giving separate chapters to a few dozen philosophers, letting each philosopher speak in their own voice and treating no one as more canonic or worthy of studying than any other. The anthology edited by Lisa Shapiro and Marcy Lascano is particularly impressive. It includes chronologically ordered works by 43 philosophers and revolves around 25 topics. Some of these topics, such as equality and difference and feminism, draw attention to certain philosophical problems, particularly racism and sexism that the canonic narrative simply cannot accommodate. Still, as the editors of both anthologies freely acknowledge in their editorial introductions, they are compelled to operate within a Eurocentric philosophy curriculum, which may not be justifiable in the first place. A related problem is that the pressure to expand the canon within the constraints of the existing curriculum can make instructors anxious. After all, instruction time is limited. This means that you'll have to condense or eliminate much of the canonic content to make room for the new tight new stuff. In doing so, you may feel bad that you're not giving adequate attention to the canonic content. Am I being irresponsible, you may ask yourself, by not teaching students the basic stuff about modern philosophy that they are expected to know. At the same time, you may also find it regrettable that you can never be as inclusive as you want to be. I have similar anxieties for many years. I've been teaching at Georgetown since 2012, right after I finished graduate school. But then the pandemic actually finally made me realize that life is too short for these kind of anxieties. So I made three radical changes to my history of modern philosophy course. First, I started asking more metaphilosophical questions to highlight the upper-turiness and contingency of the Eurocentric historiography of philosophy as we now know and practice it. I also want my students to recognize that we often, we always philosophize from a particular standpoint and that our lived experiences can profoundly shape what we choose to philosophize about and how we do it. In the case of the 17th and 18th century philosophers, it's important to register that they practice the philosophy against the backdrop of colonialism and racial slavery. And this is not something to be losing sight of and I'll return to this later. Second, once I made explicit to the students that the history of philosophy they were required to study was in essence a history of Western philosophy with white men dominating the scene and shaping the terms of discourse. I approached it partly as a history of exclusions. For example, after we read a few classical social contract theories, we also discussed how the seemingly colorblind and gender-neutral social contract turned out to be a racial contract as Charles Mills called it and a sexual one according to Carol Pateman. The third and final change I made was also the most important one in my view. It gets to the heart of why we study history of philosophy of any history at all. As an educator, I'm not here to indoctrinate the students or simply have them read a bunch of their philosophers writings that I have chosen for them. Rather, I have come to see my classroom as a site of intervention where the students and I together study history of philosophy as a liberatory practice. That is, we study the past to better understand and even better yet transform the present. In this regard, I'm inspired by James Baldwin's following statement about history. History, Baldwin says, is not merely something to be read. The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it's to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. With this view of history, I want my classroom to be a place where I and the students learn how we got here so that we can move forward better. Occasionally, this means that we'll have to carry out some sort of truth and reconciliation with past philosophers who, knowingly or otherwise, wronged much of humility with their ideas. So, okay, before I turn to Kant, as my case study, let me pause to see whether you have any questions so far. I'm going to stop here and give you a moment to see whether you have any questions. We have something in the chat. Beyond, do you have anything in the chat? Oh, okay, that's it. Okay. Okay. I mean, if there's not a question to begin with, I'm not sure if you will go into this later, but it would be very interesting if you could say a word on the difference or on the problem that is produced when you simply add certain philosophers to the curriculum, but not actually include them. I'm not sure. Oh, Alexander has a question up. Then we'll get that ahead of mine. Okay, Alexander, please feel free to speak. Hey, Alexander. Oh, you're a midget. I also teach the history of modern philosophy, and in the last couple of years, I've been trying to introduce women in the syllabus. I'm still not very sure how I should do it because there have been years where I tried themes, for instance, the role of reason and passions, for instance. There have been years where I've tried to track influences among philosophers, but sometimes it's difficult to make a fluid integration of all these six philosophers, the canonical six with others, especially because the women from what I understand in the early modern periods were very much on the side of a type of philosophy that didn't win in the history of ideas. They are not empiricists. They tend to be vitalists, for instance, in some cases, like Margaret Cavendish. It's not always easy to integrate, and of course, there's not enough time to integrate everything. What would you advise? I saw from your presentation that you already have a few strategies for that, but do you think it's better to pick a theme, for instance, like a free will or something like that, and go through the theme, talking about the way these different authors speak of that theme, or simply describe a sort of whole position of which a philosopher eventually saying, well, this doesn't go very well with this, because they were speaking about different, within different philosophies. Yeah. Thank you so much, Alexander, for that question. I think what you just said speaks to the kind of anxiety I was talking about. Not long ago, I was at another conference about the canon problem, and I heard many say we got ourselves to be under these constraints, because they think they're like, you know, to kind of teach, to kind of provide this kind of survey course, we have to kind of give them some content they're expected to learn. I kind of felt like I finally had enough of that. Again, like, it's too short to work on a driven approach. I think a free will can be one, the relationship between reason and passion, and especially if you're teaching undergraduates, they love this kind of stuff. I think of the theme, you know, based on themes. They actually don't care who you guys think the canon figures are. A lot of good figures. I'm simply not moved by it. I personally don't care. And the students can't tell if I don't feel passionate about Barclay, for example, who's philosophy, no offense to any particular one. We all have particular taste, and I have no idea why Barclay is in the canon. And so, I mean, I just, I say, okay, forget about Barclay. I don't feel, at these days, I free myself from the obligation to teach any canon figure at all. If we have to justify the inclusion of Emily Dushatile, you know, and Conway or things like that, then we have to justify the inclusion of everybody else. Like a game equal. If you have something interesting to say on the topic I want to cover, okay, I'm going to include you. If not, forget about you. Because otherwise, this canon is imposed on us, and especially after, I'm going to say how the canon came to be, we'll see that there is absolutely no moral reason that we have to cater to the canon. Now, of course, there are, can be institutional hurdles. And that's why in the end, I'm going to call in for institutional change. And I really first thing I will say, APA, I'm calling you out in this talk, if anybody is seeing connection with the APA, speak to them. They need to change this official statement about what this history of philosophy is all about. So anyways, that would be my dig. It would be just like, pick problems you care about, because your passion is going to come across to your students. And I think in the end, to me as a professor, what matters is that I have a class where students really love what I'm doing, like, love what they're reading, instead of just like, you know, listening to what I have to say. So, yeah, follow your passion. That's like cliche. I hope that helps. So, Bjorn, maybe I can come back to your question later. Yeah, of course. No, that was just to keep you off. No, no, we can take care of it later. I think that that was a lot of very nice notes. And I think it seems Barclay was on a lot of our minds. I noticed that in the chat. And I noticed him down here, too, as an example. So I have to fight for Mary, Margaret Cavendish, but Barclay is in there. So I think that that's a very, very interesting example, not that it, that you cannot learn something from him, or not that it is not interesting. But all these women are also interesting. So and I would agree even you with you, Alexandra, it might be sometimes difficult to find the connections. But on the other hand, we do not need to justify these female philosophers, or these, as you go on hoping, these non European philosophers by having something interesting to say to the questions we ask. Maybe they have something interesting to say about the questions they ask, or maybe they have something interesting to say that we are so far unwilling. Of course, I'm not implying that you said that, but that that the people who wrote the Oxford University Press History of Philosophy, considered not to be relevant, which is, I mean, that's a beautiful collection that you brought there together. And it is quite embarrassing. I mean, it changes a little bit. But these books are not very old, these books are still used to teach young students what philosophy is, which is a fairly problem. Yeah, I was brought up on them. Yeah, go ahead, Alexandra. I was going to say that in my case, it's especially difficult because I teach in Portugal. I'm from Portugal. So we don't have texts only in English. And I've been trying to give them snippets of texts that we can work with. But it's, it's, it's very difficult. Yeah, that makes it even more challenging. So it's a very, very long, long term project of mind because of these other difficulties. But well, I want to avoid what you said, that taking women as a sort of commentary or footnote to those canonical men. And you're right, we don't have to justify their presence as long as they have interesting things to say. Yeah, I hope that you didn't misunderstand me. That was not to, to sort of be contrary to your, to your position. But this is certainly aggravating the problem massively that you, that you simply do not have these texts available. I mean, they are available in English, a lot of them, certainly not all of them. But in other languages, I think it's going to get, it's going to be very difficult. Yeah. So that's a very, very important addition to the problem. Yeah. So shall we resume? Okay, great. That was a lovely break. Okay. Okay. Let me see. Okay, now I'm going to use Kant as a case study to illustrate my approach. So specifically, I'll use his case to illustrate a complicated relationship between professional philosophy and ideology. The background of this part of my talk is the book Beyond Mentioned. I finished the book back in February. The book is The View From Somewhere, Kant, Race and Racism. I actually love this particular cover. I intend to use this as my cover. It's a really accurate depiction of Kant, not just as an armchair philosopher actually, as someone who has his hand on the globe. As I will mention later, he was very oriented toward the geopolitics and all this kind of stuff. So we'll get to it. Okay. So let me say a little bit about the main title of the book, The View From Somewhere. It refers to something I suggested earlier, namely the fact that we're always looking at the world from a certain perspective. This perspective can be shaped by all sorts of factors, including the concepts and framing devices we use to organize our perceptions, the social locations we occupy, the cultural assumptions we're socialized into, and so on. I'll begin by critiquing the perspective from which critics and defenders of Kant alike tend to talk about his relation to racism. I'll then outline my own interpretation of Kant's role in shaping the racialized perspective from which Western Europeans began to see the world and the way in which we approach history of philosophy today. Let me briefly take you back to the year 2020. It was not long after the killing of George Floyd, German historian Michael Zoiska, an expert on the history of slavery, gave a radio interview in which he suggested that if people were sincere about shedding light on racism and toppling monuments, they should also look at celebrated enlightenment thinkers like Kant. Zoiska thereby raised a provocative question as to whether the metaphoric monument to Kant should stay. This immediately triggered reactions from some Kant scholars in the form of a series of articles published in leading German newspapers. Most of the Kant scholars involved in the debate argued that the monument to Kant must be left standing exactly where it had always been. They nevertheless managed to stir up some intense disagreement, or maybe not so intense, with one another. At the center of the disagreement were two well-known Kant scholars Marcus Viloushek and Mikhail Wolf. Viloushek first came out with an article arguing that Kant was a racist. Wolf countered with the claim that Kant was anti-racist. Viloushek's response was to double down and insisted that Kant was very much a racist. Wolf's reaction was also to double down and content that Kant was in fact a principled anti-racist. This exchange then prompted the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences to organize a six-part discussion series on the question of whether Kant was a racist. Evidently, the debate overall assumed an individualistic view of racism. This assumption has in fact dominated the entire discourse on Kant's racial views over the last couple of decades. This is reflected in the kind of questions people ask, namely whether or for how long Kant was a racist. At the same time, this approach makes it convenient for Kant scholars today to distance themselves and their own work from what they see as Kant's personal racism. This strategy, as I see it, is to authorize the racist Kant in order to save his philosophy. As Robert Loudon, an expert on Kant's anthropology, puts it, Kant's racism and sexism are certainly regrettable private prejudices, but his theory is stronger than his prejudices. Likewise, Alan Wood, a leading Kantian ethicist, insists that we must separate Kant's errors from the philosophical principles on which we are grounding ethical theory. In these terms, Wood describes the controversy over Kant and racism as between those who take philosophical principles seriously and those who are skeptical about the whole project of systematic philosophy. Wood is so dismissive of the latter camp that he reduces their position to matter of personal attacks on Kant and insinuates that the so-called attackers are profoundly politically motivated and have no interest in achieving philosophical insights with their so-called sensational exposés. This kind of claim from leading Kant scholars may explain why most self-identified Kantians seem to have little interest in the topic of racism because they find it philosophically insignificant, distasteful, or totally irrelevant to the work they do. They believe that they don't have to worry about this so long as they remain within the insular realm of pure Kantian principles. Such a belief is misguided, however. Above all, it's rooted in a simplistic view of racism itself and of how it pertains to Kant in particular. In my book, I adopt Sally Haslanger's conception of racism as ideological formation. This framework allows us to situate Kant as a social actor in the nexus of power relations in which his writings and teachings about race could receive significant uptake from other relevant social actors, generate looping effects with other elements, and thereby continue to the formation of a modern racist ideology. Kant occupies two particularly important positions in this regard. One is as a prominent and sophisticated scholar. The other is as a lifelong educator. I put Kant quays scholar in the context of colonial practices and highlight his perspective as a philosophical investigator of nature or what he calls naturophoxure. This connects to what I said earlier about one thing, one change I made to my syllabus is that I want my students to keep it in sight, the fact that the philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries philosophized against the backdrop of colonialism and racial slavery. One thing worth emphasizing is the fact that the 17th and 18th centuries saw an explosion of data that the Europeans collected about human beings around the world. This data collection was not accidental but was actively and intentionally promoted by early modern natural philosophers starting with Francis Bacon and members of the British Royal Society such as Robert Boyle. Europe's ever widening global reach finally gave these philosophers an opportunity to investigate the so-called book of nature in its entirety. Data about human beings in other parts of the world were collected in so far as they were considered to be part of nature. All this data prompted two developments that were key to the emergence of racial science. One is the quest for systematic taxonomy that could help the naturalists to organize all the new information about natural products. The best known such taxonomy was Linnaeus's system of nature, which made the paradigm shifting move of classifying humans as part of the animal kingdom. Linnaeus also included a fourfold classification of all humans which reflected the new four-continent view of the world. While this classification was at first simply about skin color, Linnaeus would expand it to include other features such as temperaments and habits of the mind. I'm only showing you an abbreviated version of the expanded classification here. The important point to emphasize is that with this expanded treatment of human differences, Linnaeus suggested that not only skin colors but also temperaments and habits of the mind are effective nature. This would have a profound impact on the fledgling racial science, although to my knowledge Linnaeus himself never used the term race. The second important development that would pave the way for Kant's work on racial science was Buffon's account of human varieties. As a natural philosopher, Buffon was interested in two things when it came to studying humans' quay products of nature. First, he wanted to begin with a natural history of humanity, which consists in the comprehensive description of all varieties of the human species. Second, Buffon wanted to establish a scientific account of monogenesis according to which all human varieties belong to the same species. Following the paradigm of Newtonian natural science, he wanted to show how all the different varieties can be derived from a single origin by the same law governed causal mechanisms. Roughly speaking, on Buffon's account, the different human varieties are only so many forms of degeneration from the original human prototype under the influence of climate. People of color are further in the process of degeneration according to Buffon. To a large extent, Kant's scientific theory of race took shape through an intentional and critical engagement with both Linnaeus' and Buffon's work. It's also important to note, however, that when Kant officially entered the scientific debate about human differences in the 1770s, he had already thought carefully about the relevant philosophical questions for a couple of decades. As someone who was deeply committed to systematicity and the paradigm of Newtonian science, Kant was much more methodologically aware and philosophically sophisticated than anybody else who was involved in the debate, and he was bent on defending and honing his own position in response to criticisms leveled against it. Unsurprisingly, Kant published not one but three dedicated essays on the topic with ever greater attention to the philosophical principles and methodological commitments that support his theory against the alternatives. I'll spare you the technical details of Kant's very complicated arguments and simply give you a simplified outline here. Basically, Kant's scientific theory of race posits that there is an original phylum or stem shared by all humans. This phylum contains certain germs and natural predispositions which allow the ancient humans to survive anywhere on earth. Under the influence of four radically different climates, those original germs and predispositions eventually developed into four races as differentiated by four hereditary skin colors, which were formed as irreversible adaptive responses to the respective climates. This account may sound fantastical to us now, and it's often dismissed as such, but Kant arrived at all the main propositions through careful reasonings and critical engagements with alternative approaches out there. At any rate, whether his scientific theory of race is sound doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that he, with his reputation as a rigorous and formidable thinker, introduced the first recognizably modern conception of race. Many have already argued this. At the same time, and this is the part that really interests me as an educator, Kant was also fleshing out different racial profiles in his courses on physical geography and anthropology, which together were his most popular courses and which he taught for decades. Importantly, Kant taught these courses from a pragmatic point of view. He meant to teach his students, all of whom were obviously white male, the so-called world knowledge so that they could be effective actors when they took the world stage. And that's literally what Kant said. In the appendix to, no, in his physical geography, an edited volume on his physical anthropology, sorry, physical geography. If one considers everything Kant said about the different races, one can only imagine that his students would develop a sense of their own racial superiority and then unmistakably Western Eurocentric worldview. Here is Kant's system of racial profiles in a nutshell. Basically, what he was doing was to help his white students to develop or affirm a sense of their unique capacity and destiny as the members of the superior race over against the constructed images of the allegedly inferior non-white races. With this point, let me return to my criticism of the individualistic approach to conservation, to racism. It's important to keep in mind that year after year, Kant presented to those racial profiles to generation after generation of students and some of the relevant lecture notes were transcribed and circulated beyond his classroom. Once Kant had thereby helped to form the white supremacist self-conceptions and worldviews in the minds of his audience, he could not single-handedly undo their effects, even if he wanted to. This makes mood to the kind of individualistic questions that people involved in the debate about Kant and racism tend to dwell on, namely whether he was a racist or whether the metaphorical monument to him should be left intact given his racism. The real question we should ask, I think, is how to reckon with the racist ideological legacies Kant left behind? This takes us back to the canon problem that I mentioned earlier. The ostensibly Eurocentric curriculum of the history of philosophy is in fact one of those racist legacies. Before I go further, let me pause again. I'm going to stop share. If nobody raises their hand right now, we do, in fact, have a question by Winnie. The question is, do you think it's important for lecturers to discuss their own positionality in teaching, students laying out their courses, perhaps especially when discussing racism, colonialism, sexism, and so on? Do you ever feel uncomfortable discussing your own positionality in brackets, your ethnicity, gender, sexual origination, and so on with your students? That's an awesome question. Thank you, Winnie. Yes, I do that. I'm all about vulnerability. I sometimes cry in front of the students, not as planned, but just when I felt really vulnerable. I have not always been this way, but as an Asian American, as you know, the anti-Asian hate in America, I mean probably in some other parts of the world as well during the pandemic, early period of the pandemic, finally made me realize how vulnerable I was. I was trained in this profession to think like white men. And I intentionally or unintentionally just try to be to think like a white man, to kind of strive for this masculine thinking and all these kind of things. And then just dawned on me that you just cannot hide. I realized that I, you know, during COVID, I was afraid of going out and I was when the mask mandate was gone, I was like, oh, you know, I still need my mask to hide myself. And there was very traumatizing experience. And I opened up to my students and you'll be surprised by how much the students appreciate this. It's a tricky. It has to be authentic. I think this is really important. So long as I think, to me, as my personal experience is that if you're authentic and you're willing to be vulnerable and you're willing to humanize yourself in front of your students, they really appreciate it and they can respond. And another thing that's really important is to create, I see my classroom as community now, a community of learners. And I make it very clear to them, I'm learning from them as well. And so we all say we have lived experiences that we bring to the table. And I think of my class I had, the class I had last semester, I had 20 students. It's like we know everybody's orientation, everybody's identity, everybody's situation. Like students just slowly opened up, including students who, you know, also another thing I would say, don't feel ashamed. Don't feel guilt. It's not your fault, even though, you know, that doesn't mean you're not responsible, you know, for initiating changes. So I have, we have like very wealthy white students who would, who would in the context of talking about poverty, I have students who have food security problem and when they open up and the wealthy students open up as well. And it takes a lot of courage for them to do that. So I think you can definitely buy, you can definitely model this kind of authentic conversation. And the classroom is just so much richer and students are just motivated to be there because they feel seen. The visibility really matters. And I actually just got a message from a black student, I said, had missed the same class a couple of years ago. And he basically just said, you know, I, I cannot overestimate, you know, how important, how much your class had, how much great, how great an impact your class had on me. And then he said, visibility matters. It's a risky, but I think if we are willing to learn from that, our mistakes, and if we're not defensive about it, and to be open with the students, so say, I'm here to learn, I can make mistakes, and my mistakes reflect my upbringing as well. And I'm trying to free from the confines of some of these professionalization, some of the socialization and things like that. So, Winnie, I hope that answers your question. Yeah, Winnie says, thank you so much, Hoping. I had a similar experience as a Chinese American lecturer in the UK during the pandemic, teaching epistemology and ethics, and hopefully increasingly decolonized ways. I think I've had similar experiences. Yeah, awesome. And yeah, thank you. Yeah, I agree. That's that seems to be a really important question. And just let me be so, so any other hands now, I would like to quickly add to that, because, you know, I'm the kind of guy that you thought like, I'm this white male that we're talking about. And I did think like that for quite some time. I always think about my dissertation in which I made great use of Kant and praising him and praising him, try to be critical with him. But I was simply not aware of the problems, even though I knew them. And I absolutely agree with you that a part of male philosophizing very often is hiding behind this strange idea of objectivity. And in this idea of if you open up and cry in your classroom and show yourself that you're vulnerable, you do not add to philosophy. It takes it rather takes away from philosophy, which I would, after having finally understood that I would come and say, I think it's not true. Because what happens if you hide behind this objectivity, and this is just for that sentence, just for the title alone, everybody should buy your book because it's about the view from somewhere. Because what is implied is sort of a view from nowhere, or Santiago Castro Gómez has called it, it's the hubris del punto zero. It's the hubris of the zero point of the point of nowhere. But we do not have a point from nowhere. You are in that body, and go so far to not say that you are in that body, you are the body. And I think if you open up to that, and if you show that sort of vulnerability, and sort of demythologize this idea that if you shed a tear in philosophy, you're argument is wrong. No, if you shed a tear in philosophy, that can be that can be part of the philosophy itself. So I think when you raised a very, very important point there with regards to the person you are, and as a whooping you and Winnie, as people in America during that very specific time to realize how much it matters, even if you do not see it, it will be made mattering for you by those opposing forces. And in the end, the strange phenomenon that we come across again and again is that it's actually a tiny, tiny minority, the people who are like me, who actually made it pulled a gigantic, violent, magical trick to make themselves relevant, which is this, what I like to call this superhuman fallacy, which is exactly what you described for me to use your words, that you were trained to think like a white man, which implicitly means that you were trained to not think like you. What kind of philosopher is it to train someone to not think like the person that they are? I'm sorry, I think I'm just abusing my privilege here a lot. Yeah, thank you so much. I mean, You're free to ask more questions. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I'll get to it. I'll say a little bit more about my own personal growth. And, and, you know, I'm going to connect it to this pedagogical point about the teaching and studying history as a liberatory practice, not just for the students, but for myself as well. So I've experienced a tremendous sense of growth by working on this project and learning about history of racism and the history of our canon. So that can have really liberating impact. So I just want to go so as a historian, a scholar, go slow and be careful and make sure that my claims are grounded in actual text and all that. So with that, I'm going to resume my slide. Okay. All right. So full screen again, is that correct? Okay, great. Okay, okay, I'm not gonna resume. As Peter Park has explained so well in his important book on the role of racism in the formation of the philosophical canon, the prevailing view in much of the 18th century was that philosophy originated in the East. Although there was a debate about whether it started in India or in Egypt. At the same time, there was a metaphilosophical debate about the proper method of philosophizing. On the one hand, there was the philosophical eclecticism represented by Christian Tomasius, who was particularly wary of dogmatic sectarianism. On the other hand, there was the method of system building that culminated in Christian Wolff's work. Con was attuned to both of those debates and would eventually connect them to push for Eurocentric historiography of philosophy. Regarding philosophical method, Con's solution is to preserve what he calls Wolff's dogmatic procedure for system building while correcting its dogmatism. The dogmatic procedure must be observed obvious if we are to have a proper science at all. For science must always be dogmatic, namely, it must prove its conclusions strictly are priori from secure principles. To reject Wolff's teaching of the dogmatic procedure is then, according to Con, to discard the constraints of science altogether and to turn work into play, certainty into opinion and philosophy into philodox. Meanwhile, Con finds it necessary to reject the dogmatic use of such a procedure, namely the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without an antecedent critique of its own capacity. Obviously, Con's own critique of pure reason was meant to supply such a critique. Related to the polemic about philosophical method is Con's distinction between two notions of history, for which he uses two different terms, Historia and Geschichte. Con first articulated this distinction in his third essay on race from 1788, where he contrasts the Greek Historia, which means narrative or description, and Geschichte proper, which means the investigation of origin in nature as two fundamentally different approach to natural history. What's distinctive about the Kantian Geschichte in that context is that a principle must be established in advance and a priori in order to guide the investigator of nature, even in searching and observing. This approach is essential to Con's own groundbreaking theory of race. He then extends this distinction to the debate about history of philosophy. A history of philosophy, in his view, is either a descriptive narrative Historia or a Geschichte told in accordance with an idea or principle of reason that has been established a priori. In the first category, we can find Johan Brooker's Historia, Critica, Philosophia, which represents the zenith of the 18th century German eclecticism. It's an inclusive, pluralist, and chronologically ordered narrative of all known philosophical movements. It represents Chinese, Ethiopian, Indian, and Persian, among other philosophical traditions, and does so with as much impartiality as possible. But Kant is looking for an entirely different kind of history, namely what he calls philosophical Geschichte or philosophy. This history, he claims, comes down to a gradual development of the human reason in accordance with its nature. The historical development Kant has in mind is a teleologically oriented self development of reason, analogous to the development of an organism. Just as the latter development presupposes certain original germs within the organism, so is there a germ of reason that must develop toward its destined perfection. Kant sometimes also describes this historical progression by analogy to his conception of human history, namely as a progression from the lawless state of nature through inevitable conflicts of conflicts between systems to a perpetually peaceful federation under the highest authority of a critical reason. The emphasis on the final authority of a critical reason suggests that the philosophical Geschichte of philosophy Kant is pushing for is at the bottom a progression along the so-called critical path he himself has laid down in a critical pure reason, which in his view is the only possible food path toward true philosophy. This, as Peter Park pointed out, amounts to an attempt to remake the history of philosophy into the unfolding of the pre of the Kantian critical philosophy. And this is basically the canonical framework that generations of professional philosophers have bought into and perpetuated to this day. The old canon is in fact a variation of Kant's picture in the final section of the critique of pure reason, entitled the history of pure reason, where he claims to cast a cursory glance from a merely transcendental point of view, namely that of the nature of pure reason on the whole of its labor's hitherto. Kant's own partial historiography features the four ancient Greeks, epicures, democracies, Plato and Aristotle, followed by four of his modern predecessors, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume. These figures supposedly represent the major revolutionary moments in the phenomenal unfolding of the Geschichte of philosophy. Once again, the narrative points to Kant's own critical philosophy as the end of such a history, an end that supposedly aligns with the destiny of human reason. At the same time, Kant needs something else to argue that philosophy could have originated and progressed further only in the West. This something else is a mixture of his racial ology and his orientalism, according to which the yellow race and the orientals in general, including the so-called oriental whites, such as the Arabs, were simply incapable of forming abstract concepts and principles that one needs in order to philosophize properly, namely to build philosophical systems. Kant racializes this alleged inability by treating it as an irreversible disposition. If a people in no way improves itself over centuries, Kant claims, then one may assume that there already exists in it a certain natural predisposition which it is not capable of exceeding. The Hindus, the Persians, the Chinese, the Turks, and in general all oriental peoples belong to this group. This reason, Kant contends that true philosophy, in so far as it presupposes the ability for abstract and systematic reasoning, could have originated and continued to progress only in the West, and absolutely not in the East, such as his armchair answer to the debated question about the origin of philosophy. The answer is summarized in what's known as the Yeshe logic, which was published in 1800 under Kant's name and with his authorization. Directly referring to the debate about the beginning of philosophizing, Kant first states his punchline, that is, among all peoples the Greeks first began to philosophize, for they first attempted to cultivate cognitions reason, not with images as the guiding thread, but in abstracto, while other people always sought to make concepts understandable only through images in concreto. He then mentions the Chinese and some Eastern Indians as examples of people who admittedly deal with things that are derived merely from reason like God, the immortality of the soul, etc., but who nonetheless do not seek to investigate the nature of these things in accordance with concepts and rules in abstracto. This is as clear an early statement as we can get of the founding myth behind the old canon. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history. Evidently, a lot of scholars continue to subscribe to the myth, either explicitly like the editor of the OUP anthology I mentioned earlier, or implicitly by holding on to the overall framework of the canonical narrative about history and philosophy without seeing anything wrong with it. At the same time, these scholars are likely unaware of the racist reasoning behind the whole framework. For this reason, I see the canonical framework as a form of practiced ideology and a fundamentally racist one for that. To be clear, I'm not leveling the charge of racism against any individual. Again, I'm really against individualistic approach to racism. Rather, I'm focusing on structural problems in academic philosophy and on an ideology that runs deep in our profession. As Jay Goldfield puts it in the foreword to Brian Van Norden's excellent book, Taking Back Philosophy, a social structure can be racist without any individual who participates in it being racist. When it serves to establish or to perpetuate a set of practices that systematically denigrate implicitly or explicitly people of particular races. Philosophy as it is practiced professionally in much of the world, and in the United States in particular, is racist in precisely this sense. To omit all of the philosophy of Asia, Africa, India and the Indigenous Americas from the curriculum and to ignore it in our research is to convey the impression whether intentionally or not that it is of less value than the philosophy produced in European culture or worse to convey the impression willingly or not that no other culture was capable of philosophical thought. These are racist views. The question now is whether we can reflectively endorse such practices, not that we've uncovered their racist underpinnings. As far as I'm concerned, the answer is absolutely no. And I would add that once we see the truth, we become responsible. We have to do something to free ourselves and future students alike from the grip of the ideology of a Eurocentric approach to philosophy. We cannot accomplish this merely by expanding the canon and adding a handful of women and philosophers of color within the existing framework. Although doing so is already a huge step forward. What more can those of us do, you may ask, who don't have access to the institutional power to completely revamp the curriculum in our department? Oh, by the way, my department is moving away from the existing canon. I can tell you a little bit more about the kind of conversations my department has had and what kind of success, better future we're trying to work toward. Okay. But anyways, I don't have a ready answer to this question. And that's the problem with working against an entrenched institutional arrangement. So I think it's something that we need to figure out collectively. And those of us who have greater institutional power also have a greater responsibility to push for and facilitate radical reforms. In the meantime, I think there's something most of us can do regardless of where we are in our career. This takes me to the pedagogical point I made earlier, that is, even within the confines of the existing curriculum, we can strive to teach and study history of philosophy as a liberatory practice. Let me illustrate this point with my own experience I already indicated a bit earlier. So now you can probably tell I'm Chinese. I was born and raised in China. I studied philosophy under the tutelage of four to Western trained professors at Peking University before I came to the US to pursue a PhD in philosophy. For many years, starting when I was still in Beijing, I simply assumed that doing real philosophy meant doing Western philosophy and that Chinese philosophy is not philosophical enough to be worthy of my intellectual energy. Deep down, I was ashamed of being Chinese and of my own cultural heritage. Only over the last couple of years, it finally dawned on me that this sense of shame reflected the mentality of a historically denigrated race and virtually, if not literally, colonized people. Understanding this historical root of my internalized self-directed racism was a profoundly liberating experience. This personal experience also informed the design of my new syllabus for the history of modern philosophy course. The very first unit of the syllabus is on how natural philosophers from Bacon and Boyle to Kant contributed to the development of modern racial ology. Here I'm showing you a screenshot of part of the unit. Altogether, the unit revolves around five natural philosophers. Besides the three I just mentioned, I also added Buffon and Blumenbach. While the students often found it upsetting to read the primary texts, they also found it liberating to learn about the historical roots of the racist ideology that still bedevils our society today. And it meant most to the students of color, unsurprisingly to me. Unlike me, they also experienced some form of internalized racism, and it was empowering to understand why they felt the way they did. Okay, my last slide. It also helps that in a unit on self-knowledge, friendship, and happiness, we returned to the topic of race and talked about how one's race as well as gender may affect how one sees oneself and others, what kind of close friends one can have, and what sense of well-being. Since I emphasized self-compassion, mutual respect, and authenticity as well as intellectual curiosity and rigor throughout the semester, the students and I really delved into those topics and had some of the most vulnerable but also most meaningful and rewarding philosophical discussions we ever experienced. We, including me, ended the discussions feeling both edified and empowered. This is what I mean by studying history, philosophy, as a liberatory practice, which is intended not just for the students, but also for the instructor. Okay, all right. I'll leave you at this point. Thank you so much for your attention. I really look forward to the discussion. I'm going to stop here.