Blog Archives

Race in the Enlightenment, Part II: Kant and Blumenbach

5/30/2018

In this episode, we think we’ve finally found the main culprit: Immanuel Kant! We also discuss two scientists that get a lot of undeserved blame for scientific racism: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Petrus Camper.

Some Resources:

To see where these Enlightenment views on race have ended up today, we give you two Steve King interviews. 1. At the Republican Convention: https://youtu.be/Ti5t1WXMs9k; and 2. defending those remarks: https://youtu.be/w3sV6NN5gqs
Sally Hatch Gray, “Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color,” The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 53, No. 4 (WINTER 2012), pp. 393-412.
Very, Ryan. “Kant’s Racism” (2012)
For a view on Kant that says he tempered his racism in his later works, see Kleingeld, Pauline. “Kant’s second thoughts on race.” The Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 229 (2007): 573-592.
For a good look at problems with translations of Blumenbach, see Michael, John S. “Nuance Lost in Translation: Interpretations of JF Blumenbach’s Anthropology in the English Speaking World.” NTM 25, no. 3 (2017): 281-309.
Meijer, Miriam Claude, and Petrus Camper. “Petrus Camper on the Origin and Color of Blacks.” History of Anthropology Newsletter 24, no. 2 (1997): 3-9.
Müller-Wille, Staffan. “Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World.” The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014. 191-209.

The Blame Game—18th century version

5/8/2018

In this episode we discuss two of the heavy lifters from the enlightenment when it comes to spreading a scientific concept of race: Buffon and Linnaeus.

Here are some resources for this topic:

Try Jim’s blog post about Buffon and race: http://jbindon.people.ua.edu/race-and-human-variation/darwins-borrowed-allegory-and-the-apocryphal-six-races-of-buffon
Ashley, Montagu. “Man's most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race.” New York, Harper (1942).
Linnaeus’s 1735 first attempt at classification is available here: https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002972252
While it turns out that Victor of Aveyron did not turn up until 1800, long after Linnaeus was dead and buried, there were other wild children that almost certainly caught the botanists attention. In his 1858 10th edition of Systema Naturae, he cites a wild child from Lithuania in 1661, and others from 1344 and 1719, unclear where they came from.
For an English version of much of Linnaeus’s work, including a discussion of changes in human classification throughout his 12 editions of Systema Naturae on human classification, see Bendyshe, Thomas. “The history of anthropology: On the anthropology of Linnaeus.” Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London 1 (1865): 421-458.

Race in the Enlightenment, Part II: Kant and Blumenbach

The Blame Game—18th century version

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