Women of Color and Philosophy A Critical Reader

Philosophy is in its fourth millennium but this collection is the first of its kind. Twelve contemporary women of color who are American academic philosophers consider the methods and subjects of the discipline from perspectives partly informed by their experiences as African American, Asian American, Latina, Mixed Race and Native American. The essays represent the authors' views on a wide range of topics: community, epistemology and social identity, alterity, metaphysics, rationalist ethics, loyalty, intellectual history, and realism. The writing is without jargon and the methods of argument will be familiar to traditional philosophers. The ideas, interpretations and suggestions give voice to changes in the field that many readers will recognize as inevitable and overdue. Themes include critique of tradition, applications of philosophical method to social issues and proposals for change. Specific topics range from moral issues in interracial marriage, to indigenous rights, to the application of cognitive science to metaphysical theories of properties. Despite its breadth, Women of Color and Philosophy examines assumptions and new directions, in depth and with lucid specificity. This collection can be read as a challenge to the field as well as a forum for its smallest minority, as reassurance and encouragement for the independent thinkers from the center to the periphery.

Naomi Zack teaches philosophy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Race and Mixed Race (1993), Bachelors of Science: Seventeenth Century Identity, Then and Now (1996), and Thinking About Race (1998). She is the editor of American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (1995), RACE/SEX: Their Sameness, Difference and Interplay (1997), and co-editor of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 1998).