Lea Ypi – Kant The Racist?

This paper examines Kant’s thoughts on race considering his analysis of teleology. It explains how Kant analysed the development of human races in connection to his account of the development of "germs" and "dispositions" in the human species. It further explains how that theory changed with the introduction of Kant’s analysis of reflective judgment. The paper argues that the important shifts in Kant’s analysis of teleology after the third Critique had crucial implications for Kant’s assessment of the development of human races and limit the scope of the charges of racism his theories have recently received.

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD. She has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.
For more on her, visit: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/YPI/

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