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WiSe 22/23: The Semantics, Metaphysics, and Politics of Race

Daniel James

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In 2020, the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain at the hands of the police in the United States sparked a renewed wave of protest against police violence. However, what was new this time was that this protest also prompted a broad public debate about racism here in Germany. A central part of this debate concerned whether the term "Rasse" should be removed from German Basic Law, replaced by another, or retained (albeit in a modified meaning). Last November, this debate culminated in the Federal Government's declaration that it would replace the term "Rasse" from Basic Law with an altered formulation to protect against racist discrimination. Others in the debate have pushed back against this demand, interestingly themselves citing an anti-racist cause as their reason for doing so: They object that the legal concept of race is a necessary instrument to tackle racist discrimination. This debate revolves around questions that also fall into the domain of philosophy and, more specifically, the philosophy of race: What does our "race talk" mean? To what kind of entities does it commit us? What are races, according to these commitments, and do they match our best scientific theories, say, in biology or sociology? Should we change the meaning of our racial classifications such that they better serve our theoretical or practical ends? The lively philosophical discussion of the semantics, metaphysics, and politics of race suggests that it might also shed light on the philosophical issues underlying the current public debate over "Rasse" in Germany. In this seminar, we will discuss philosophical accounts of the ordinary or 'folk' meaning and concept of race and the central metaphysical views on the nature and existence of race. These views will include anti-realism/eliminativism, social constructionism and biological realism. Two questions that will chiefly concern us in our discussion are: Can these views be applied to the German context and, if yes, how? Is there one 'folk' concept of race shared across different cultural contexts, or rather several different folk conceptions of race relative to these contexts? close