In "Race: A Philosophical Introduction," Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. Blending metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Winant, and Naomi Zack. The result is the first philosophical introduction to the field of race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.


The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don't we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories, and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. Race is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.