Sally Haslanger

Joshua Glasgow

Quayshawn Spencer

Chike Jeffers

"In this debate-format book, four philosophers - Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer; articulate contrasting views on race. Each author presents a distinct viewpoint on what race is, and then replies to the others, offering theories that are clear and accessible to undergraduates, lay readers, and non-specialists, as well as other philosophers of race"--

Four Philosophical Views

What Is Race?

"While navigating his own mother's cancer diagnosis, the author explores how we might find solace in the fact that we will die. Traditionally, philosophical answers to this question center on two possibilities. First, some argue that death is not bad for the one who dies, because they won't exist after once they are dead. Second, others argue that because immortality would be bad, death has considerable upside. Finding these two answers less than satisfying, the author explores a third option. This third source of solace starts with the idea that insofar as our lives are worth being grateful for, they must have a value. This book argues that because life is implicated in all of our good projects and relationships, its value radiates out to all of life's parts, be they good or bad. And because passing away is one of the parts of life, it gets some of this radiant value. Finally, just as we are grateful for the value of our lives, so we can affirm this value in passing away. Gratitude is not the most fitting way of affirming the value in death, since passing away is also bad for us by depriving us of life's good opportunities. A more fitting affirmation of the value that death borrows from life, in a context where passing away also visits so much badness upon us, is to take some solace in the fact that our passing away has this portion of positive value"--

Finding Value in Death Through Gratitude for Life

The Solace

Social commentators have long asked whether racial categories should be conserved or eliminated from our practices, discourse, institutions, and perhaps even private thoughts. In A Theory of Race, Joshua Glasgow argues that this set of choices unnecessarily presents us with too few options. Using both traditional philosophical tools and recent psychological research to investigate folk understandings of race, Glasgow argues that, as ordinarily conceived, race is an illusion. However, our pressing need to speak to and make sense of social life requires that we employ something like racial discourse. These competing pressures, Glasgow maintains, ultimately require us to stop conceptualizing race as something biological, and instead understand it as an entirely social phenomenon.

Joshua Glasgow

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