Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-being (SUNY series, Philosophy and Race)

La 4e de couv. indique : "The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human, ' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems." "The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems" -- From the publisher Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 A Racial Non-Being......Page 10 The Thesis and Goal of This Study......Page 16 The Methodology of a Critical History of the Mind-Body Problem......Page 27 Chapter One Descartes’s Fundamental Mind-Body Problem: The Question of Sex......Page 38 The Distinct Origins of Mind and Body......Page 45 The Disposition of the Blood and the Sexual Generation of the Union......Page 51 The Racial Legacy of a Genealogical Mind-Body Dualism......Page 68 Chapter Two A Thing Not-Yet Human: Bonnet’s Problem of the Egg......Page 90 Leibniz’s History of Mind and Body......Page 97 The Not-Yet Human: Bonnet’s History of the Mind-Body Union......Page 103 How is progress guaranteed?......Page 106 What is the efficient cause of reason?......Page 109 How does preformation promote the thingification of the not-yet human?......Page 116 What is the purpose of the not-yet humans? Why do they exist?......Page 121 A Problem of the Egg......Page 133 Chapter Three “All races will be extinguished . . . only not that of the Whites”: A Mind-Body Problem in the Kantian Tradition......Page 142 Racial Mind-Body Unions......Page 143 The Overturning of the Mind-Body Problem......Page 166 Solutions and Experts......Page 193 Notes......Page 202 References......Page 236 Index......Page 262