The ethnological foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment

The lecture:

The philosophical debates during the Enlightenment concerning the origin and purpose of racial difference provided the rationale for formalizing the study of racial groups in the United Kingdom in the early 1800s. Influenced by the burgeoning field of physiognomy, white thinkers throughout Scotland and England embraced the idea that skin color was evidence of deeper physiological and evolutionary traits in the body. This lecture will show how the ideas of Dugald Stewart and David Hume provided the basis of the ethnological sciences.

The lecturer:

Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, as well as the author of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (2018), which won the 2020 Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought.