Warding Off the Ghosts of Race in the Historiography of Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract This article contends that an adequate investigation of the role and effects of race in the history of philosophy requires an elucidation of the ways in which the history of philosophy functions as a “territorial” structure. This argument is developed through an extensive cross-examination of Peter Park's Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon 1780–1830 (2013) and Catherine König-Pralong's La colonie philosophique. Écrire l'histoire de la philosophie aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (2019). I show that although the two studies inquire into the fixation of the history of philosophy on Europe that took place in German and French philosophy at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, they do so via different explanatory frameworks, highlighting diverging critical strategies in the dismantling of Eurocentrism in the discipline. In the final part I contrast three broad critical strategies against the Eurocentric orientation of the historiography of philosophy based on opposite problematizations of the territoriality of the history of philosophy: the territory as (1) jurisdiction, (2) relational field, and (3) space of address.