11.13：哲学与好奇”午餐会第九期：RACE, METAPHYSICAL DETERMINISM AND THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
主题: RACE, METAPHYSICAL DETERMINISM AND THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
地点: 哲学系B114
时间: 11月13日(周三) 中午12:10-13:30 （12点就可以来吃饭了）
主讲人:项舒晨 Shuchen Xiang
主要内容:
This paper argues that the racism which governed European colonialism (i.e. since Columbus’ “discovery” of the “New World”) shares many similarities with the characteristics that A. O. Lovejoy discussed with regard to the Great Chain of Being in his classic, The Great Chain of Being. Under this racial worldview, difference is not understood as emergent but as ontological, this ontological difference is parsed hierarchically, and the only relationship which exists among the different ranks of difference is domination. This paper will use representative examples from European racism and colonialism, most notably the European colonisation of the Americas, to substantiate these parallels. Through the works of James Baldwin, William James and the Mary Douglas, this paper ends with a critique of the epistemological errors implicit in the ontologising and hierarchising of difference and the moral failures attendant upon these epistemological errors. These epistemological and moral failings, it is argued, are attributable a fatalism that sees no human agency in ordering the world and a failure of nerve in being responsible for the order that we do create.