This is the first book dedicated to a systematic exploration of Kant's position on colonialism. Bringing together a team of leading scholars in both the history of political thought and normative theory, the chapters in the volume seek to place Kant's thoughts on colonialism in historical context, examine the tensions that the assessment of colonialism produces in Kant's work, and evaluate the relevance of these reflections for current debates on global justice and the relation of Western political thinking to other parts of the world.

Advances normative notion of transnational cosmopolitanism based on Du Bois's writings and practice, and discusses limitations of Kantian cosmopolitanism.

Kantian Genesis of the Problem of Scientific Education terms the dominant educational paradigm of our time as scientific education and subjects it to historical analysis to bring its tacit racial, colonial and Eurocentric biases into view. Using archaeology and genealogy as tools of investigation, it traces the emergence of scientific education and related racial and colonial inequities in Western modernity, especially in the works of the defining figure of Western Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. The book addresses the key role played by Kant in establishing a Eurocentric rational notion of the human being. It also reveals genealogical continuities between Kantian and neoliberal rationality of the all-embracing market of today. It discusses several strategies for resistance against the imperial rationality based on decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and suggests basic principles for a shift of paradigm in education, including shifts in our understanding of the notions of criticism, freedom, the universal, art and the human being. This book will be of great interest for academics and researchers and post graduate students in the fields of education, philosophy, and philosophy of education.

Publisher Description

Examines how distinctive liberalisms respond to racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based forms of diversity and difference.

Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

This book argues that to understand the complexities of our current legal-institutional arrangements, we first need an insight into Kant's global politics, and highlights the potential fruitfulness of Kant's cosmopolitan thought for contemporary political thinking.

This 2007 volume contains all of Kant's major writings on human nature.

Late eighteenth-century writings on race by Kant and four of his contemporaries. Kant and the Concept of Race features translations of four texts by Immanuel Kant frequently designated his Racenschriften (race essays), in which he develops and defends an early theory of race. Also included are translations of essays by four of Kant’s contemporaries—E. A. W. Zimmermann, Georg Forster, Christoph Meiners, and Christoph Girtanner—which illustrate that Kant’s interest in the subject of race was part of a larger discussion about human “differences,” one that impacted the development of scientific fields ranging from natural history to physical anthropology to biology.

This is the first book dedicated to a systematic exploration of Kant's position on colonialism. Bringing together a team of leading scholars in both the history of political thought and normative theory, the chapters in the volume seek to place Kant's thoughts on colonialism in historical context, examine the tensions that the assessment of colonialism produces in Kant's work, and evaluate the relevance of these reflections for current debates on global justice and the relation of Western political thinking to other parts of the world.