Lecture
Institute for Philosophy Opening Academic Year 2023-2024
- Date
- Thursday 7 September 2023
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.05
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 the Institute of Philosophy will celebrate the opening of Academic Year 2023-2024. All staff, students, and members of the wider philosophical community are cordially invited to attend the presentations.
| 16:00 | Opening & Welcome |
Douglas Berger |
| 16:10 | Speech |
Nas Abshari |
| 16:25 | Lecture |
Marie Louise Krogh |
| 17:00 |
Drinks & bites in the Faculty Club
|
The Institution of Barbarism: Alexander von Humboldt on Race, Slavery, and Colonialism
The contemporary critical philosophy of race can be characterised by a dual approach to its object: a rejection of the old, pseudoscientific concept of race and new conceptualisations of the experiential and socio-political reality of racial divides. ‘Race’, in this context, is not a biological category, but a historically and institutionally conditioned form of social division. In this paper, I propose that we might read the writings of Prussian polymath, natural scientist, cosmopolitan, and abolitionist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) precisely along those lines. I will both examine his critique of the purportedly scientific concepts of race introduced by Immanuel Kant and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century and demonstrate his sensibility to how ideas of white racial superiority reinforced social hierarchies in the colonies. I will conclude the paper by considering how Humboldt’s writings compare to arguments against slavery and colonialism of the period and how, despite his best intentions, some of these writings became central to a predominantly economic mode of colonial exploitation in the Americas, at the moment where many of the colonies were at the brink of achieving independence.
