In this essay, I discuss Kant’s views on the “American race.” Robert Bernasconi has pointed out that more research on the sources of Kant’s ideas on non-white races is needed in order to have a better understanding of his racism. This essay responds to that call in order to show how Kant contributed to on-going discussions on the causes and meaning of human differences. However, I will also focus on his influence on his contemporaries. The reason for doing so is (...) two-fold. Firstly, I will question Irene Tucker’s recent attempt to show that skin color was considered a racial sign because of its supposed self-evidence and immediate legibility. By way of a presentation of Kant’s views on the “American race,” I will show that race mixing formed the core of Kant’s racial theory and not the alleged immediacy of racial sight. Secondly, I will focus on his influence in order to question the popular idea that Kant had in his late work developed second thoughts on his racial hierarchy. His appraisal of the work of one of his contemporaries clearly shows that the matter is far more complicated than suggested in these interpretations of Kant’s racial work. (shrink)

This thesis is devoted to studying two historical philosophical events that happened in the West and the East. A metaphysical crisis stimulated Kant’s writings during his late critical period towards the notion of the supersensible. It further motivated a methodological shift and his coining of reflective judgment, which eventually brought about a systemic unfolding of his critical philosophy via Kantian moral teleology. Zhu Xi and his Neo-Confucian contemporaries confronted a transformed intellectual landscape resulting from the Neo-Daoist and Buddhist discourses of (...) “what is beyond the form”. The revival of Confucianism required a method in order to relocate the formless Dao back into daily life and to reconstruct a meta-ethical foundation within a social context. This led to the Neo-Confucian recasting of “investigation of things” from The Great Learning via complex hermeneutic operations. By the respective investigation on, as well as the comparative analysis of the two events, I reveal the convergence and incommensurability between the two distinct cultural traditions concerning the metaphysical quests, the mechanism of intellectual development, and moral teleology, so as to capture the intrinsic characteristics of philosophical research in general. (shrink)