Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy

Description

People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human

Justin E. H. Smith is university professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Universite Paris Diderot--Paris VII. He is the author of Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton), coeditor and cotranslator of The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, and a regular contributor to the New York Times and other publications.

"In this innovative, thought-provoking book, Smith (history and philosophy of science, Universite Paris Diderot, Paris 7) looks at the construction and evolution, in natural science and anthropology, of 17th- and 18th-century modern views of racial difference--views that led to racial typing, racial profiling, prejudice, and implicit bias... This is a valuable book for those interested in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and multiculturalism, the history of race, and the history of natural science and anthropology."--Choice