[bioundgrd] Fwd: 24.293 Topics in Philosophy: Race & Biology

[MacKenzie Outlund]

Spring 2010
24.293 Topics in Philosophy: Race & Biology
TR, 2:30-4:00pm, Bldg.66-160
Quayshawn Spencer
qspencer at mit.edu
MLK Visiting Assistant Professor
Dept. of Linguistics & Philosophy
12 units

Course Description
What is a race? Is race a biological kind? The standard philosophical view
is that race either
does not exist, or is a social construct. But is either true? New
developments in evolutionary
biology challenge the standard view. So, this course boldly sets out to
explore what, if anything,
biology can tell us about the nature of race. The course is divided into
three parts. During the
first part we will study biological theories of race developed before the
modern evolutionary
synthesis, as well as the standard philosophical critiques against them. For
example, we will
introduce and understand Appiah’s famous semantic argument for why race does
not, and
cannot, exist.

In the second part of the course, we will explore biological theories of
race developed after the
modern evolutionary synthesis, with an emphasis on biological theories of
race developed in the
last 12 years. We will also learn about the three major philosophical
responses to the new
biology of race. Here, we will tackle several new philosophical questions,
such as, how much
can biologists change the meaning of ‘race’ and still call it ‘race’, what
does it mean to represent
human evolutionary history using a phylogenetic tree, must race be a natural
kind in order to be a
legitimate biological kind, and can biologists detach the project of
defining ‘race’ from the
project of defining ‘species’?

In the last part of the course we will use what we have learned to do some
applied philosophy.
Specifically, we will investigate the plausibility of a curious new trend in
commercial genetics:
using genetic genealogy tests to identify people’s ethnic ancestries. Some
claim that such tests
are a godsend, especially for African Americans whose ethnic origins were
lost during American
slavery. However, we will explore whether such tests are capable of
providing the information
that they claim to be able to provide, and if not, what they can tell us
about our ancestries.
 --
--------------------------------------------------------
Sally Haslanger
Professor of Philosophy
Director, Women's and Gender Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.mit.edu/~shaslang/home.html
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