Faculty

Robert Bernasconi

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy

Bernasconi
 Education:
  • B.A., Philosophy, School of English and American Studies, Sussex University, 1972. First Class honors.
  • D. Phil., Sussex University, 1982
Areas of Specialization:
  • Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy
  • Critical Philosophy of Race
  • Social and Political Philosophy
  • Modern Philosophy
  • History of Ethics
Recent Courses:
  • Hegel's Philosophy of Religion
  • Sartre and Fanon
  • Levinas
  • Modern Political Philosophy and Slavery
Recent Publications:
  • How to Read Sartre, London, Granta Press, 2006; New York, Norton, 2007.
  • Race, Miscegenation, and Hybridity, 3 vols. coedited with introductions to each volume cowritten with Kristie Dotson, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 2005.
  • “With What Must the History of Philosophy Begin? Hegel’s Role in the Debate on the Place of India within the History of Philosophy,” in Hegel’s History of Philosophy: New Interpretations, ed. David A. Duquette, Albany: SUNY Press, 2003, pp. 35-49.
  • “‘Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up?’ The Challenge of Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy, 117, January/February 2003, pp. 13-22.
  • With Anika Maaza Mann, “The Contradictions of Racism: Locke, Slavery, and the Two Treatises,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, pp. 89-107.
  • “Levinas and the Struggle for Existence,” Addressing Levinas, eds. Eric Nelson, Kent Still and Antje Kapust, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2005, pp. 170-184.
  • “Sartre’s Response to Merleau-Ponty’s Charge of Subjectivism,” Philosophy Today, vol. 50, SPEP Supplement, 2006, pp. 113-125. Revised version of 138.a.
  • “Black Skin, White Skulls: The Nineteenth Century Debate over the Racial Identity of the Ancient Egyptians,” Parallax, 43, April 2007, pp. 6-20
  • “Can Race be Thought in Terms of Facticity? A Reconsideration of Sartre’s and Fanon’s Existential Theories of Race” in Rethinking Facticity, eds. François Raffoul and Eric Nelson, Albany: SUNY Press, 2008, pp. 195-213.
  • “An Haitian in Paris: Antenor Firmin as a Philosopher Against Racism,” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 4/5, Sept.-Dec. 2008, pp. 365-384.
  Current Projects:

  • "I try to write an essay in each of my areas of specialization every year so as to maintain my expertise. My long term project is to write a philosophical history of the concept of race. In the midterm I intend to write a short monograph on the failure of most seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers to engage with the evils of the slave trade."

 

Faculty