<div class="gmail_quote">Spring 2010<br>24.293 Topics in Philosophy: Race & Biology<br>TR, 2:30-4:00pm, Bldg.66-160<br>Quayshawn Spencer<br><a href="mailto:qspencer@mit.edu" target="_blank">qspencer@mit.edu</a><br>MLK Visiting Assistant Professor<br>
Dept. of Linguistics & Philosophy<br>
12 units<br><br>Course Description<br>
What is a race? Is race a biological kind? The standard philosophical view is that race either<br>does not exist, or is a social construct. But is either true? New developments in evolutionary<br>biology challenge the standard view. So, this course boldly sets out to explore what, if anything,<br>
biology can tell us about the nature of race. The course is divided into three parts. During the<br>first part we will study biological theories of race developed before the modern evolutionary<br>synthesis, as well as the standard philosophical critiques against them. For example, we will<br>
introduce and understand Appiah’s famous semantic argument for why race does not, and<br>cannot, exist.<br><br>In the second part of the course, we will explore biological theories of race developed after the<br>modern evolutionary synthesis, with an emphasis on biological theories of race developed in the<br>
last 12 years. We will also learn about the three major philosophical responses to the new<br>biology of race. Here, we will tackle several new philosophical questions, such as, how much<br>can biologists change the meaning of ‘race’ and still call it ‘race’, what does it mean to represent<br>
human evolutionary history using a phylogenetic tree, must race be a natural kind in order to be a<br>legitimate biological kind, and can biologists detach the project of defining ‘race’ from the<br>project of defining ‘species’?<br>
<br>In the last part of the course we will use what we have learned to do some applied philosophy.<br>Specifically, we will investigate the plausibility of a curious new trend in commercial genetics:<br>using genetic genealogy tests to identify people’s ethnic ancestries. Some claim that such tests<br>
are a godsend, especially for African Americans whose ethnic origins were lost during American<br>slavery. However, we will explore whether such tests are capable of providing the information<br>that they claim to be able to provide, and if not, what they can tell us about our ancestries.<br>
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-- <br>--------------------------------------------------------<br>Sally Haslanger<br>Professor of Philosophy<br>Director, Women's and Gender Studies<br>Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br><a href="http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/home.html" target="_blank">http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/home.html</a><br>
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