Race: A Philosophical Introduction - Hardcover

Taylor, Paul C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745649653 ISBN 13: 9780745649658

Publisher: Polity, 2013

Synopsis

Race In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Second Edition , Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. As in the first edition, the book blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience. Full description

About this title

Review:

"An exemplary text - the second edition deserves to be widely read and adopted in classrooms."
South African Journal of Philosophy

"Taylor has succeeded at introducing a wide audience to a timely and rich topic with considerable purchase on the American social discourse he targets."
LSE Review of Books

"What makes the witty and clearly-written Race: A Philosophical Introduction such a valuable book is that Taylor not only thoroughly dissects the concept of race to show its inner workings but also provides a cogent and rational argument for the continued employment of race as a category for both describing our present social reality as well as serving to undo the harm inflicted by ever-evolving forms of racialism."
Marx and Philosophy

"Paul Taylor may only, as he says, 'gently recommend' the approach he develops here, but he offers compelling arguments that raise the level of discussion on all sorts of race matters. This new edition extends the discussion to more recent topics, such as the demise of affirmative action and new work on the metaphysics of race, making the book more useful than ever. And it is still the most entertaining philosophy book I have ever read."
Linda Martin Alcoff, Syracuse University

"Moving fluidly and wittily between high theory and popular culture, Paul Taylor's book is, quite simply, the best philosophical introduction to race I know. I have made it a required text every time I have taught race, whether at the undergraduate or graduate levels. This welcome new edition updates the 2003 original to include Barack Obama's election, controversies around undocumented immigration, and the ominous pattern of growing securitization - all shaped by race in a very much non-post-racial world."
Charles Mills, Northwestern University

From the Back Cover:

In "Race: A Philosophical Introduction," Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. Blending metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Winant, and Naomi Zack. The result is the first philosophical introduction to the field of race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.

The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don't we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories, and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. Race is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0745649653
• ISBN 13: 9780745649658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 240