Kant’s Racism and the Historiography of Philosophy

Abstract This article reads chapter 6 of Huaping Lu-Adler’s Kant, Race, and Racism as a contribution to the contemporary debate about racism and the philosophical canon that began with Peter Park’s Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy. Lu-Adler adds to Park’s narrative a detailed analysis of the link between racism and the historiography of philosophy in Kant’s own work, not just in his followers or those who influenced him. By doing so, this article argues, Lu-Adler enables critical philosophers of race to tell a new version of the story about racism in the history of philosophy that preserves the main conclusions drawn by Park, without having to rest so much of the case on an argument about the influence of Christoph Meiners. The second part raises two problems for Lu-Adler’s account, the first relating to the question of methodology and the role of pre-Kantian historian of philosophy Jacob Brucker, and the second relating to Lu-Adler’s account of Kant as an educator who contributed to racist ideology.