Philosophy

Paul C. Taylor (UCLA) will provide a colloquium talk to the UF Philosophy Department in the Friends of Music Room.

Title: Uneasy Sanctuaries: Unthinking Race-Thinking

Abstract: In the introduction to his remarkable book, Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison identifies one of the stumbling blocks to successful “Negro” fiction. The problem, he suggests, is “the writer’s refusal… to achieve a vision of life and a resourcefulness of craft commensurate with the complexity of their actual situation.” What does this refusal lead to? “Too often,” Ellison explains, writers “fear to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race to take their chances in a world of art.”

Ellison’s diagnosis, or something like it, applies with equal force to philosophers. We are also prone to treating real-world complexity as something that sullies or sidetracks our work, even when, like Ellison’s writers, we think we’re taking race seriously. Even worse, race is often just the first sanctuary, and our attempts to escape it lead us to other places of false refuge.

I propose to explore the itinerary of evasion that can result from philosophical attempts to take race seriously. This itinerary will run through a variety of uneasy sanctuaries, starting with race itself and winding through disciplinarity, canonicity, heretical theory, and prophetic witness. The aim will be to highlight some underappreciated challenges to the work of philosophical race theory and to cultivate a responsible orientation to the work in light of its challenges.

Paul C. Taylor is the Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his undegraduate training at Morehouse College and his graduate training at the Kennedy School of Government and at Rutgers University. His research focuses primarily on aesthetics, the philosophy of race, American philosophy, and Africana philosophy. His books include Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, which received the 2017 monograph prize from the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), and Race: A Philosophical Introduction.